


alone with you

by blueparacosm



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Claustrophobia, Depression, Domestic Fluff, Dyslexia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Healing, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Isolation, M/M, Mental Disintegration, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Starvation, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21952411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: It seemed to him now a very simple and irrefutable fact: John Murphy would die alone.Перевод на русский
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/John Murphy
Comments: 38
Kudos: 191





	alone with you

**Author's Note:**

> this is a completely self-indulgent ode to murphy and bellamy (especially murphy, whose MI and trauma from the bunker i wanted to explore in detail) and to try and give one good honest gay story to my favorite hostages of this shitty science fiction action drama cw show
> 
> i imagine this one will be kind of hit or miss, but buckle up for the long haul and enjoy, i hope
> 
> happy holidays! :D

_Day One_

Murphy wanted out, because he liked to have choices.

His swollen, gnawed arm ached as he pulled the door toward him, and groaned again as he tried pushing on it instead. With a huff, he stopped to cradle his elbow, watching blood blossom beneath his bandages.

Murphy wanted out, and he wondered where he would go. He thought he might keep walking until he hit something, anything, and his face pinched when the image he conjured was a glowing city.

Stupid. He had been _stupid_ to let Jaha infect him with his fairytale. He’d nearly been killed— burnt up to a little desert crisp, blasted by a bazooka, made ground meat by buried bombs and fish food after that— all in the hope that he might find someplace where he wouldn’t be alone. It went about as brilliantly as most of his desperate, pathetic plans did, he thought, with his uneven breathing the only sound for miles.

His arm twinged as he dropped it to his side. He slumped down on the dark stairs and spared a moment to uncoil the tightness inside, trapped-animal-panic simmering, and tried to think clearly.

A fancy bunker stocked with food and booze wasn’t the worst place he’d ever been stuck in by far, and he’d get the door open soon enough. It wasn’t like he had anywhere to be, or anyone to see.

He climbed his way back down the short, twisted staircase, intending to forget the sealed door for a moment. 

The den beckoned, twinkling with soft, honey light and the solved mystery of a bloodstain on the suede cushion. On the large television screen the tape ran, the man named Chris’ body gone and his friends with him. It was obvious they hadn’t made it back inside before the wave that destroyed the world washed over the island. All the better for Murphy, who thought the distinct lack of rotting corpses in his unwilling hideout was a small mercy.

He pressed the same red button on the remote he had pressed before, and the video of an unmoving and rather uninteresting bloodstain went black, shrouding the room in a bit more darkness. 

After days upon days spent in ceaseless, beaming sun and wide open desert, Murphy felt like a bumbling idiot as he tried to weave around cramped furniture to get to the kitchen, knocking into short glass tables and tripping over things in the dim light, like a shiny little pistol cradled in the rug’s many yarn tendrils. He bent to pick it up and tossed it with care but not ceremony onto a bookshelf, lacking need of a weapon for once in his life.

That was another thing, he mused, finally released from the furniture maze of the den into the kitchen and hunching over the momentarily forgotten sleeve of crackers. He ate slowly this time, drawing himself out of his protective slouch and sliding hesitantly onto one of the shiny red stools along the counter. He didn’t need a weapon, because he was alone. He didn’t need to loom over his food, because he was alone. He didn’t need to stand, to be ready to run or to fight, because he was alone.

He swiveled a bit on the stool, a silly little hum jumping into his throat. He was _alone._

For perhaps the first time in seventeen years, Murphy thought maybe that wasn’t such a terrible thing after all.

_Day Two_

He did not startle awake. He did not wake with a gasp, ripped from a nightmare or dreading the day to come. He rolled over on the sleek umber sofa with a squeak of skin on leather, and lay there a moment, still, meaning to keep inside the chalk-outline of warmth his body had made on the cold couch the night previous.

He wasn’t sure how he’d decide when it was night again, or if it was even morning now, as he was unable to read the ancient analog clock sitting wisened and ornate upon the bookshelf. He supposed it didn’t matter. He could sleep whenever he wanted. He could sleep all day if it pleased him.

He liked the yellow throw. It was warm but not stifling. He kept it around his shoulders as he padded to the kitchen, leaving the empty sleeve of dry crackers abandoned and rifling around in one of the many cabinets, which went surprisingly deep. Who would ever need this much food?

He extracted a foil bag labeled “arpicot lehaters” and tore it open, not bothering to squint at the letters until he made himself sick, like he’d done in school. Inside were several dark strips of something sweet-smelling and Murphy tucked in, grunting as he had to gnaw on the chewy strips and wrench his head to the side like an animal to tear a piece free. They were annoying to eat and too sweet on his tongue, making his stomach turn.

He explored a different container in the cabinet and retrieved some kind of generic protein bar instead, and slid a hand across granite to knock the fruity strips and the cracker wrapper into a bin at the end of the counter. Big deal. Murphy was always a picky eater when he had the option to be one, and there was more food here than he could ever hope to eat.

He shuffled around the den for a while, surveying his surroundings and taking inventory. He left the books alone, but turned the hands on the clock atop the bookshelf out of place, childishly enjoying the urgent ticking of the little golden clock as he forced it around and around and sped up time of his own accord. 

Moving behind the sofa, he took the white ball out of the pool table and rolled it into one of the pockets, and then again, and one more time. He wondered if it would hurt if his fingers were squashed between the white ball hurtling through the chutes and the blue-striped ball, which sat in the chamber at the bottom of the table. 

He slung the white ball into a pocket as hard as he could, and winced as it flew up over the side of the pool table and crashed with a _ping_ into the metal banister of the dark stairs, bouncing from the railing to the lamp to the back of the couch to the floor, ending up sitting obediently at Murphy’s feet. He sighed with relief as the lampshade quit its nervous wobbling and settled again.

Though he supposed it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d broken anything. This was _his_ lighthouse now, after all. He could smash everything in here, if he liked.

A small block of chalk sat on the smooth edge of the pool table, and he scratched a tally into the green surface of it. If he couldn’t read the clock or see the sun, he supposed he could keep track of the days this way. Not that it would matter if he never got that door open, but he would. Soon.

Not that he was in any hurry.

Murphy made his way toward the big television, staring into the black and wiggling his toes in the soft carpet. It was easy on his perpetually blistered feet, hardened and calloused from endless following, chasing, hiking, running. Mostly running. He tugged the throw tighter around his shoulders, too, thinking of all the nice things in the bunker, like tasty liquor and soft carpet and warm blankets, and less of the way Chris’ body had flopped back against the suede cushion and the way his neck had gone rubbery and his eyes had gone dull and the way it looked so much easier than Murphy had ever thought it could be.

Just a crook of his finger.

He swallowed, and took the camera down from its stand. He pressed what he thought was the On button, and On it flickered. He struggled with some of the other buttons, accidentally dimming the screen, taking a blurry photo of the floor and the barely discernible tops of his toes, and eventually deleting the first of a massive library of past videos. Chris’ videos.

He sifted through them, usually skipping to the next before any given recording had finished. It was all a bit boring; following the process of developing some godlike hologram that would make life better for mankind. It looked like Chris’ plans went about the same as Murphy’s usually did. Honestly, he was finding a bit of a kindred soul in the man.

“Log,” said Chris, smiling a bit sadly into the camera as Murphy pressed play. “Day six-hundred and ninety four.”

Murphy took another bite of his protein bar, kicking his feet up onto the glass coffee table.

“A.L.I.E.’s throwing a kind of tantrum over machine learning. There’s a lot less learning and lot more picking and choosing going on. She seems to discard information about the effects of natural disasters and biological warfare on humans’ overall happiness. She’s very impartial to numbers. Still causing a lot of destruction during simulations. I suppose I expected that from an algorithm. It’s not her fault. I think this suggests a failure on our part to… _encode_ morality. Emotion. Not an easy task. Not at all. We’ll keep trying.” 

He smiled again, the soft, bruise-eyed smile of a man who would fail until the end of the world. (Murphy had skipped ahead a little.) Then the recording stopped.

Murphy stared at the camera for a moment, considering, and shrugged. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do. He experimented with the buttons until the camera’s display read “RERODNICG,” which probably meant what he thought it meant, and turned it on himself.

“Uh, log,” he parroted. “Day two.” He took a bite of his bar, and spoke through it. “I’m… eating a protein bar? It’s alright, but it does smell weird. I guess I’ll work on the door after this.” He glanced over his shoulder, staring up at those foreboding stairs. “I’m starting to think there might be some kind of command code, or maybe a secret button. But I’ll just try an old-fashioned battering ram first, kind of just for the hell of it.

“It’s not so bad in here. I think I might stay.

“I’m not sure who I’m talking to, or if anyone will ever see this. Maybe if I accidentally end the world again and some other idiot gets stuck in here a hundred years from now, they’ll have this to entertain them.

“Or not. Guess I’m not that funny when I’m alone.”

_Day Three_

“Let.” Murphy slammed the red kitchen stool against the door. “Me.” Again. _“Out!”_ He swung it a final time, hard against the sunken diamond shape in the door, and then let go of the stool and ignored it as it bounced noisily down the stairs, sliding until it landed on the main floor again.

He sunk against the door and held his knees to his chest, pressing his ear to the thick metal to listen for a sound. A voice was ambitious, but wind, birds, the sea… anything.

There was only a cold and thick, empty sound, like being underwater. Nothing, and he could hear that it was so.

Murphy felt his face crumple and his fingers white-knuckle the fabric of his pants. The frustration was eating at him, making him want to pull out his hair and his teeth and his eyes. He wanted to twist up into an impossible ball of limbs, he wanted to explode.

He took in a deep breath and stood, brushing himself off. He descended the dark stairs and cranked the radio up to a million until he was dizzy with noise, until his bones buzzed.

That was enough for now. He’d keep trying, later.

There were a million movies in the long, rotating cabinet beneath the television, and the liquor and wine was rich and endless.

He traced the glossy crimson fairing of one of the motorcycles in the kitchen, dancing his fingers along the handles and ridges and spokes of the second as he stalked around the room, sipping mindfully at the whisky in his tumbler. Didn’t want to end up like mother, after all, so Murphy took care to keep his refills down to one or two, and to never fill them to more than a finger, or two.

The motorcycles made him a bit sad. There was no point to them in here. They were meant to be out in the open, speeding past people and buildings and cars, ditching the cops like they did in _Mission: Impossible,_ which Murphy had watched last night on the big television. 

Now there weren’t even any roads to drive them on, just cracked slabs of pavement scattered around the sprawling forests for Murphy to trip on whenever he was running from something, because the universe wanted him to die and hated him down to its concrete chunks. 

Murphy thought he might try taking one of the bikes across the beach once he got out of here, and probably break all of his limbs or accidentally drive it on its back wheel into the ocean, but for the time being the three of them would just have to sit around and look pretty.

He plunked down crosslegged in front of the movie cabinet, spinning the rotating shelf inside until it had gone halfway around. The movies in the very back had fuzzier pictures on their fronts, as if they were older or taken with a shakier hand. The people weren’t wearing much in the way of clothes, if any, and the movies were obviously romances, which Murphy had always liked.

“Girnndig Gares,” read the cover. Murphy read it again. “Gnindrig Greas.” He glanced up to clear his eyes, and then looked down at the cover again. “Girdning Gears.”

_Grinding Gears,_ he thought, and frowned, placing the DVD in the movie player and scooting himself across the rug to lean against the foot of the couch as the television blasted on and the ambient noises of the film cut the radio off sharply, demanding its turn on the surrounding speakers perched in the uppermost corners of the den.

Murphy allowed the movie to unfold despite its slightly grainy quality and questionable acting, finding himself scoffing at terrible lines and frowning as what he understood of social etiquette was dashed again and again. That woman had no business bothering the mechanic while he was trying to work, and he seemed strangely unperturbed by her obnoxiousness, as if struck dumb.

Murphy found out why not long after the mechanic bent the woman over the clothes dryer, evidently not all that concerned about breaking it more.

He pressed the red button the remote quickly, whiskey sloshing out of his glass to splatter across the coffee table and dribble over his fingers. He sat back on his haunches with a burning face, staring into the empty television.

They’d never shown any movies like _that_ in the screening room.

Tentatively, Murphy turned it back on, and then off again. Then on again, with the volume a little lower for his own dignity’s sake, and watched until a particularly long close-up on the mechanic’s horrible, sweaty face revealed dark eyes and a peppering of freckles.

Murphy turned it off again, and lay facedown in the couch cushions for a while.

Talking about it was one thing, but Murphy had never _seen—_ and he looked just like— and was it _really_ —?

Never mind, he thought, taking out the DVD and packing it neatly away, deliberately not looking at the two men tangled in an embrace on the very next case. Never mind. He spun the shelf back around to the action movies, and stopped thinking of the rest.

He didn’t know those people. He couldn’t— not that it would be okay if— well they would never— even if he looked just like—

Never mind.

The real romance movies would do just fine for soothing the lonely ache in his heart, and the soothing of aches elsewhere would continue to be a private affair between Murphy and himself, like everything always was.

… Jesus, never mind.

_Day Four_

“Log, day four.”

Murphy sighed, resting the camera on the edge of the sticky coffee table and pulling the yellow throw tighter over his head and around his body until only his face was free of it, and tilted sideways onto the couch. With a little more energy it might have been considered a flop, but as it stood, it was only something of a _fwump._

“I soaked some dried beans,” he began, and then sighed again. There was never anything to talk about.

Talking to the camera felt like talking to Bellamy. He wanted to say more, but he didn’t know what. He said something boring instead. Sometimes funny, but impersonal, and often rude. Usually a complaint, though Murphy found other people who complained to be boring. Bellamy always seemed content to listen before he hated Murphy and almost killed him, but Murphy still worried that he was boring.

“I soaked some dried beans,” he sighed. Then, “I miss my mom,” he blurted, and found that it was true, with no one around to hear it. 

“She always had something to talk about. She liked to— well, she liked to gossip, but so do I.” Murphy smiled, somewhat inhibited by the half of his face pressed against the couch within its yellow cocoon. “So and so is having their baby, so and so got floated, so and so gets cigarettes from Nygel and smokes them in the kitchens, so and so is a bitch.” He laughed out a silent breath. “It was usually that last one. Most people were bitches. I’m inclined to agree.

“Not her, though. Not when she was still herself.” He felt himself giving one of those awful, trodden smiles like Chris did to the camera, and sniffed derisively, cutting it short. “If you’re seeing this, you’re a bitch. Jaha, you’re a bitch. Bellamy, you’re a bitch. Clarke, you’re a bitch. Raven, you’re a bitch, even if I’m sorry.” With a pause and a frown, Murphy realized he didn’t know many people at all. “Everyone’s a bitch. I’m glad I’m finally alone.”

He chewed the inside of his cheek, sitting up so the yellow throw pooled at his waist and reaching out for his third glass of scotch, half-empty on the dirty table. “I do count myself,” he admitted, waving a dismissive hand. “I’m not— I’m not an idiot. I know I— I mean, it’s usually my fault, at first, but everyone always—“ He surprised himself with a hiccup, which crawled up from his throat unwelcome. “I only give as good as I get. What’s so wrong with that?”

He took a bigger gulp of his scotch than he should have, and slammed the glass on the table and the video camera shut as he coughed into his wrist, eyes watering from the burn of it. When he was finished choking, he dropped his face into his hands and scrubbed ferociously, feeling like he wouldn’t be all that upset if that when he looked up at his reflection in the television his face was gone.

It would be nice to start over.

He stood abruptly and swayed forward, a bit hot in the face and perhaps a little tipsy. He flicked the stupid wobbling lamp off of the side table and disregarded the indignant crack it gave as it hit the floor, and hefted the side table up the dark stairs.

He beat the legs of the table against the diamond in the door until his teeth rattled, until his arms ached and his hands were slick with sweat, until he’d thrown it to the bottom to lie with the kitchen stool and cried at the foot of the door with his forehead pressed to the metal, not knowing if he’d even leave should the door suddenly fall open, and wanting it desperately all the same.

He just really liked to have choices.

_Day Ten_

Murphy awoke with a long, wet string of drool connecting his mouth to the leather sofa cushion, and wiped it away with the heel of his palm as he creaked into a sitting position.

He blinked slowly, rubbing a bit of crust from hooded eyes. It felt like he never got a morning anymore, never reset. There was no telling whether it was noon or evening or dawn in the real world, and the only sign that Murphy had gotten twelve hours of sleep instead of three days of it was the push on his bladder and an unconcerned warble of hunger in his gut.

He cast aside his yellow throw and padded into the little gray bathroom off of the den, not bothering to guide the sliding door closed beneath his palm, which felt sticky with dried liquor from whatever he’d spilled the night previous.

Upon a flush, the toilet gave a heaving sigh that suggested no dearth of water for the bunker, which was always a small relief to Murphy. He scrubbed at his hands under the sink’s sleek faucet and splashed his face so that his eyes might fully unseal, giving a few wide-eyed blinks at his reflection in the mirror to ensure that they had.

His hairline and lashes glistened with water, the tip of his chin and the point of his nose dripped. The bright light overhead suggested him gaunt and pale like a skeleton, and made his eyes appear deep and cold and unfriendly in his face. They sat like blue marbles, glassy and unmoved.

He traced an old scar that curved underneath his eye, a crescent moon with three faint streams of lights falling from it, stretching down to parallel the corner of his frown. The moonscar had been twice opened and closed, and so had healed a bit raised, rough and defined. The three downward slashes were much more subtle, however, pale and ribbed to the touch.

**_There are a_** ** _rrows, cages, fire, blades, and so much blood. Slice down, he dreams, please slice down. Kill me, he thinks, come and save me. Where is he, kill me. He’s not coming, no one’s coming, just kill me. But they don't, not appreciating nearly enough that this was the only time he'd ever ask._** ****

Murphy slammed the faucet handle down and brushed his teeth until he’d nearly flattened the bristles. He shedded his clothes and bandages and stood under a scaldingly hot pounding of water, watching dirt and sand and pink tendrils of old blood swirl down the drain. He used the shampoo, the soap. He washed behind his ears and between his toes. He got out and let water puddle around him on the floor, feeling faint in the humid air. He toweled off, and the skin of his legs and arms and belly and chest were red and peeling. 

He smelled like mint. It was all so goddamned _stupid._

Murphy gripped the edge of the white marble counter and took in a great breath that made his chest feel like a balloon. He closed his eyes and thought of all the nice things: tasty liquor and soft carpet and warm blankets, even if they were stupid too.

He filled the sink up with warm water and stuffed his clothes into the basin, water sloshing over the edges so it pattered onto the tiles and seeped beneath his feet. He used the green soap to make bubbles and knead out the grime, rinsed them clean and hung them over the shower rod.

There was a bedroom off of the kitchen, an oriental rug draped over cherry hardwood and a sprawling bed covered in silk cream sheets. There were three sleek electric guitars on the wall that Murphy wanted to touch, and strange art of gored and naked people that he felt compelled to stare at. There was a trunk at the end of the great big bed, full of soft and slick clothes. They were clean and neatly folded, wildly patterned and gorgeous.

Murphy was not one for sanctity, but sometimes he felt like the line between himself and Chris had the potential of becoming blurred. So— not so much in respect for the dead, but for the sake of his own damn sanity— he left the bedroom alone. 

Though he would have looked dashing in a black silk robe, the one with the faint patterns of red roses blooming all across it. He would have looked _dashing,_ if there were anyone around to see him.

He stepped out of the humid bathroom to survey the rest of his least favorite of three or so prisons. _What a dump_ he thought, borrowed from the 1949 film _Beyond the Forest,_ which Murphy had seen the night previous. He scrubbed down the sticky coffee table and crumpled up the trash he’d left scattered around, cramming it all down into the bottom of the kitchen bin. He wiped up the crumbs on the counter and kneeled to clean a wine spill on the dark stairs, feeling as if the hulking bunker door was bearing down on him all the while until there was a tightness in his chest.

When he was finished, he wrapped the yellow blanket around himself and sat in the middle of the sofa, hugging his red knees to his naked chest. The leather was cold on his rear and his back, leaving goosebumps to prickle over his raw skin, soft and shiny and swollen as if down to a fresh sheet of it. Murphy wondered how many sheets were between him and feeling clean again.

He could have done a video log, or had something to eat, or marked off what he hoped was only his tenth day. He could have watched a thirtieth movie or played another lonely game of pool, the kind where he used his hands because he didn’t understand how they used the cue. He could have tried to open the door.

_What a dump._

Murphy lay down on the couch and closed his eyes. He supposed he’d just wait for his clothes to dry.

_Day Twenty-One_

__**_He flexes his fingers around the belt and his wounds still ache. This isn’t home, nowhere is home. Murphy wants him to feel what he felt and to tell Murphy he's sorry. Murphy wants him to die, and to tell Murphy he's sorry. If he would just say he was sorry it could all be over, and they could be happy again. Things aren't looking good._** ****

**_Bellamy looks like he hates him when he spits it, and Murphy thinks it would have been so much simpler if he had hated him all along._** **_“I’m sorry. Happy now?”_** ****

**_How can he try to appease him like he's crazy? He's not crazy, this is justice— “This is insane.”— He's not insane, they did this to him. If he would just tell him he was sorry, he'd talk and he'd cry and he'd hesitate and he'd fire at nothing, he'd fire at everything but him, he'd give him until the very last second._** ****

**_He never says it right, he never means it, and Bellamy swings and chokes and it should feel so good. Murphy tries to look happy because he said he would be, because today he’s setting everything right between them. He hits Bellamy in the stomach so it goes faster, feels his eyes blasted open wide as if with a gust of wind for one last good look, as he slams the butt of the gun again and again against crumbling ribs._ ** ****

**_Bellamy goes quieter and slower than he had imagined and it isn’t a death fit for him at all. His hands are red from fighting it, where they dangle at his sides. Murphy stays looking at him, even as the drop ship door starts to groan its way down._ ** ****

**_He remembers when Bellamy first smiled at him. Now look at him. He'd rather have him dead than hating him. That isn’t love, that isn’t devotion. He doesn't know what that is._ ** ****

**_Maybe he really is insane._ ** ****

Murphy woke with a start, sitting up and slamming his forehead against the inside of the pool table’s chamber. He lowered his face to his hands, one covering the bruise that was sure to bloom and the other over his mouth, holding in a surely wretched sound of grief.

He dragged himself out from under the table, steadying himself with a hand on the muscled back of an iron dog statue guarding the sofa, while his heart still pounded. 

He took up the two-sided talking drum he’d been using to beat the door in. He took that now-rare energy, the anger, the fear, the anything— and brought it with him to the top of the dark stairs.

Murphy reared back and charged, pounding the flat of the drum against the diamond in the door. He pulled back and heaved toward it again, teeth shaking in his skull when he made impact. The diamond indention always rattled a little, just enough to tease Murphy into believing he might be making a difference. But he wasn’t. He was never getting out.

He would die in here, and no one would ever come looking. No one would even notice he was gone.

He could get out, he could live in all the glowing cities of the world, it didn’t matter; he would always be alone.

With an anguished, guttural sound, Murphy punched the diamond in the door with all the strength he had left, and summoned up just enough more to beat his fists against it again and again and again. His knuckles scraped the metal edges of the indention until they bled and the hard little bones of them shivered under his skin as he brought them down ceaselessly against the impossible door.

When he couldn’t take the pain anymore he slumped to the floor of those dark stairs, cradling his bloodied hand which felt bent forever now into a little useless red moon, and he bared his teeth and cried.

He cried not because he couldn’t help it, or because it all hurt so badly. He cried because he wanted to. Because he always wanted to.

It seemed to him now a very simple and irrefutable fact: John Murphy would die alone. After all, who could love somebody like him?

_Day Forty-four_

The dog was hungry.

Murphy fed it arpicot lehaters, and pulled his yellow throw around its shoulders. 

He took care of everything in the bunker.

He fed the dog and cheered up the motorcycles. He twirled the hands on the little fancy clock, which it liked. He spoke with the billiard balls often, even if they didn’t have much to say. He opened the door to the bedroom to say hello to the three guitars and the strange paintings, but never went inside. He made sure the movies were always in order of color, even the porn.

He’d watched all of them, eventually. Sometimes he rewatched his favorite movies— like Scarface, or, oh, _oh,_ Romeo and Juliet— over and over. 

His father had read the play to him once, and Murphy had never been able to shake it. The romance, the desperation, the obsession. There was something that made him feel starved about forbidden, die-for-it love. He’d always wanted something like that. To love fast and hard and go down in the great blazing fire of it.

It was nice that he could watch that movie again and again, remember it better and save it somewhere deep in his heart.

He’d finished all the movies and listened to all the songs, and he’d tried to read the books. Really, he had.

“G'morning,” he said to the kitchen on day forty-four, squatting to reach for a bag of jerky and startling when his hand hit the back of the cabinet. He dropped to his knees and craned his neck to see into the dark cupboard, and found that many things were only left in stacks of ones and twos.

He paused to consider what that meant.

Eventually, there would be no more food. He would starve to death. Not for a few weeks, he could probably make it over a month before there was nothing left at all, if he rationed it. But soon, he would starve to death.

Murphy felt somber that day, lying prone on the sofa and listening to sad songs from sad-looking CDs on the boombox, resolutely ignoring the first of many stomach grumbles to come and nursing a sudden surety that life was _not_ like a box of chocolates.

He wished he hadn’t thrown away all those lehaters. It was a bad way to die, starving, and he’d be sorry to leave the dog all alone.

_Day Sixty-seven_

It was a little fuzzy, but somewhere around day thirty Murphy had taken all of the bottles of liquor and wine down from the tiered rack on the kitchen wall, backlit in blue and presenting each bottle like a special little treasure.

They were very old bottles of liquor and wine, dizzyingly delicious and undoubtedly valuable.

Murphy had taken them down until the bottles had covered the kitchen island and made the place look like an apothecary. Then, one by one, he’d uncorked and unscrewed them, and poured them down the sink. 

It had taken longer than he’d thought it would. They glugged out so slowly, and had a rhythm to them. They wanted people to watch, to reconsider how much they were pouring. It had taken long enough that he had considered whether not becoming his mother and dying in a puddle of puke as the darkness crept in was worth having nothing to dull the hurt of it anymore.

He had felt proud of himself afterward, stuffing all of the empty bottles into the corners of Chris’ room. He’d shown real strength of will.

Murphy of day sixty-seven hated Murphy of day maybe-thirty, hated him and wanted him to die in a puddle of puke.

The alcohol was gone. The food was almost gone. He’d seen all the movies, watched all the video logs. The dog was too hungry to play, the motorcycles and the clock and the billiard balls found Murphy’s conversation boring.

The shiny little pistol gleamed at him from the coffee table, where he had positioned it just so.

In the Skybox, a boy they’d gone to school with had twisted his bedsheets around his neck and tied the other end to the railing of the top bunk, and tossed himself over the edge while his bunkmate was sleeping. Hard, evidently.

Murphy had felt pale and sick at lunch that next day, poking at his pudding as everyone called the boy strong-willed for being able to do such a thing, to go against his own primal instinct to survive.

He would’ve been eighteen the next month, and had been arrested for taking an extra pair of colored shoelaces from the resource center.

“They were probably about to pardon his stupid ass,” Murphy had muttered, and Blythe, the redhead who always mooned after Mbege and made Murphy’s life more miserable than it strictly had to be, gave him one of those very righteous frowns he was so often the recipient of.

“Maybe it wasn’t about getting floated,” she argued, and Murphy turned back to pushing his food around, sensing a losing battle. “You don’t know what he was going through.”

Murphy lay awake in his bunk that night reassuring himself of the same principle he had always lived by. People were born to live. That’s all there was to do. 

Oh, how redheaded Blythe would have loved to see him now.

Murphy closed his eyes against the pistol’s glint and turned his gaze to the ceiling, taking one of his great heaving breaths. Then another and another, thinking of Shoelaces’ body rolling down the corridor on a stretcher and Chris’ glassy eyes and the bloodstain on the suede cushion.

He didn’t want to starve to death, and he didn’t want to kill himself either. What kind of a choice was that?

With a sudden flare of anger, Murphy kicked at the coffee table so the pistol went ricocheting off of it as it jerked across the rug. He stood and took the fancy clock from atop the bookshelf and slammed it on the hardwood, where the face of it shattered with a tinkle of glass and an abused little chime. He hooked his fingers around the back of the bookshelf and yanked it to the floor, so all the books came tumbling out and crushed their yellowed pages against each other.

Chest jumping and caving again, Murphy stalked over to the pool table and took up the white ball, slung it at the great big television so cracks spidered all across it and the video log that had been playing fell apart in colored blocks and flickers of static. He turned, fists clenched at his sides and eyes furious and wild, and faced Chris’ door.

He crossed through the kitchen like a black storm, shoving the door in so it slammed against the wall. Stepping past the plum edges of the intricate rug that he had deemed the boundary of something just short of holy ground, Murphy dug ferociously through the trunk of clothes, tearing at fabric, flinging silks and cottons and polyesters over his shoulders until they were strewn about the room in wrinkled piles. 

Then he took the electric guitars down from their mounts and smashed the bodies of them off of their necks one by one, reveling in the whines of breaking strings. 

He took to the strange paintings of nude bodies bathed in blood and gored them further, yanking them off of their nails and impaling them on the guitar neck of his choice. The paintings’ subjects went so much quieter than their open mouths of anguish would have suggested.

Whipping around to find his next victim, Murphy laid his sights on the swarm of empty wine bottles and descended upon them, raising one after another over his head to send them twirling into the opposite wall, where they each blasted apart in a firework of dark glass.

It took until the sixth bottle for a shard of glass to take its revenge on him, ricocheting off the wall and embedding itself in his upper arm.

The slick sting of it as Murphy excavated the glass was enough to discourage him from smashing another, and just as quickly as it came, the thundercloud that had formed behind his eyes dissipated.

He took in the damage he had done: the minefield of black glass, the shredded paintings and busted guitars, the clothes strewn about the room and the once-sacred trunk a yawning void for the lack of them.

Murphy walked hesitantly over to the bed that he had never touched, the black pillows still perfectly fluffed, the shiny cream sheets prim and unwrinkled. Crawling onto the bed and facing the headboard on his knees, Murphy slid one of the perfect pillows beneath his thighs, imagining that it was Chris, and then he beat the everliving shit out of it.

“You killed me!” he screamed, fists flying back and pitching forward. “You and the fucking— your fucking bunker!” The pillow seemed to gasp as Murphy bore down on it, punching the feathers inside senseless. 

“I’m gonna die in here!” he roared, choking on a sob as his eyes burned with rage. He forgot, for a moment, to be killing the pillow, and gripped it by its sides, shaking it so it might understand. “You had to have somewhere to run when you fucked it all up, and now I’m gonna die in here because of _you!"_

Breathing heavily, he sat back on his heels and stared at the black fabric, half-squashed under his thighs and spattered with dark spots of blood flung from the cut in his arm. Chris the Pillow did not reply, and Murphy collapsed atop him, so full of hate and his closed eyes weeping with it.

A brief silence passed as they lied together, disturbed at last only by Murphy’s stomach giving a pleading little grumble.

“Shut up. It doesn’t matter,” Murphy answered, his voice a raw and mangled thing. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

It was a bad way to die.

_Day Eighty-six_

“Log, eighty-six days. I’m on my, um, last box of food, so. Really never thought I’d miss the Ark this much, but…” Murphy’s breath shook on a sigh, and he felt it rumbling up in him again, the fury. “Anyway, Jaha, if you’re seeing this, that would indeed mean you are not dead, so _screw you!”_

The fury at the unfairness of it all; the fury at the knowledge that he never really had a chance.

Murphy placed the camera aside and took the pistol up from the coffee table, and his shoulders ground into the sofa where he sat against the foot of it, as if to get away. He turned the pistol over in his palms, rooting himself down even as his hands trembled, even as what were left of his muscles tensed tight.

It took strong will to go against one’s primal instinct to survive.

Murphy’s breath shuddered out again as the cool metal touched the underside of his chin. He’d thought this through— temple, mouth, heart, chin. He didn’t trust a bullet to the temple. Inside the mouth seemed complicated and undignified. A shot through the heart was overdone, melodramatic, _Chris._

Up through the chin, though. If he fucked that up, then he deserved to die slowly.

He pressed the barrel in a little harder, feeling an endless, silent stream of tears dripping onto his hands and sliding down his arms.

Eyes open? Eyes closed. No, eyes open, one last look at the world. If only this shit-hole could be called that.

Murphy thought of sunlight, that very first bloom of it through the treetops. They were taller than anything he’d ever seen, leaves shaking as if giggling at his big, stupefied eyes. Green, green, green. 

He thought of the feeling of wind on his skin as he raced off of the ship, feeling laughter bubble up in his chest and keep coming. Feeling camaraderie and love for the smiling people all around him, as they slapped each other’s backs and tumbled together in the brush, no matter that they would hate him again when the sun was gone. For the moment they were animals, all one and the same, reduced to meaningless noises of joy and wonder.

He thought of warm fire and cold rain and shouting at the top of his lungs, meeting Bellamy’s pleased brown eyes across the way. Water falling from the sky, could you believe that?

He thought of the velvet slide of violet wildflowers under his fingers, rough bark against his back and wet stones glittering under his boots. The rich smell of earth and the river, little sour green apples dangling from a wiry tree.

For a few days, it was hard to feel lonely. He might’ve never stopped chasing that feeling.

With one last, sharp breath in, Murphy let the gun fall from his hands.

A sob slipped out of the back of his throat as he knitted his hands together over the back of his pounding head, long, long hair twined through. He squeezed hard at the tangled stems of it, hating himself hating himself hating himself.

Murphy wanted out, but he didn’t want it to hurt.

“Please,” he asked of no one.

Then, like in so many dreams, there was a hiss of air from the dark stairs and for the first time, the bunker replied.

“Containment door released.”

Murphy’s heart stopped in his chest. Feeling as if he were in a bad enough way to imagine something so cruel, he turned onto his knees and stared, desperate, at the staircase.

It had sounded so real.

Kicking folds into the rug, Murphy scrambled half upright and half on hands and knees to the steps, beating his bony legs and wrists against them in a mad dash for the diamond.

Sitting on his heels and staring up at it, the diamond in the door appeared level again with the rest of the metal, having given up the great sigh of an eighty-six day breath.

Murphy was afraid to try. If he pushed on the metal and it didn’t budge, he thought something might really break inside him. Then he supposed he didn’t have much to lose, and reached out to press his fingers against the cold blue. It swung open quietly as the world fell out from under Murphy.

He stumbled out onto the earth, falling to his knees again like a fawn on new legs. The white sun of morning beat down upon him so that his eyes were closed, and he balled his fists in the pebbled sand to feel that this was real.

He could have cried if he hadn’t been out of tears, wetness drying on his cheeks as a breeze whispered over his skin. He could have laughed if he weren’t so tired, and the noises of joy and wonder caught in his throat.

His eyes creaked open slowly, tentative, and free from the shadow of the lighthouse, he saw the sea. He saw towering trees and grass gleaming with dew, small birds dipping down to skim over the foamy waves.

He saw a drone hovering out in the open, waiting for him on the rocky beach. It chirped at him as he came closer on unsteady legs, and jerked back towards the island. Then it darted in closer again, swinging to and fro as if indecisive.

“Hi,” said Murphy. The drone beeped in answer, and Murphy made his way toward the rowboat, still sitting abandoned in the rocks. As he tossed the oars inside and dragged the boat toward the water, the drone began to chirp ferociously, making more little jerks toward the thick woods of the island.

“No way,” replied Murphy, sitting down on the center bench and taking in a deep breath as he readied the oars.

There was a chance he might only make it a mile out to sea before he was eaten alive, but at least it was more interesting than a bullet in the head.

The world smelled of wet earth and sea salt, and Murphy grinned as the breeze tucked his long, long hair out of his face. The drone whirred unhappily, but came closer to the rowboat despite itself. He guessed he’d have company.

It hovered quietly as he rowed them away from the rocky shore, sometimes darting to and fro but never straying far from Murphy. He didn’t have it in him to wonder why. He didn’t have much in him at all.

He felt himself go still at the sight of the lighthouse shrinking in the distance, the white and black stripes wrapping around the tower looking so differently to him now than they had once. 

He remembered throwing up his hands and letting a victorious cry rip from him, one that painted the midnight air of late winter in a burst of white breath. He’d only ever felt like that once before, like he had so much joy inside that he had to move, somehow, and let it free. He’d been so happy to see that lighthouse, gleaming in the faraway.

Now, rowing all alone in the shadows of clouds save for his little tagalong, the structure’s colors appeared to him like the stripes on something poisonous, warning him to get far, far away— and quickly.

Murphy intended to do so, and moved to sit facing the seemingly endless horizon of the gulf, leaving the lighthouse and the bunker and _Chris_ behind him. 

He rowed until a violet sunset stretched over the sky, a pitch night hanging onto its coattails. His arms were sore already, palms stinging from their desperate grip on the oars, and Murphy released them to the floorboards for a moment to massage his hands.

Now, he hadn’t expected to make it very far, though his stomach still tightened as he felt the boat rock, disturbed by unnatural little waves, odd splashes geysering up from the dark sea. He took up the oars and kept rowing.

He _kept rowing,_ fists tightening around the paddles as the monster pounded the bottom of the boat with its tail, or perhaps its head. There was really no telling which.

"We're gonna need a bigger boat," he whispered, curling and uncurling his fingers on the oars until his knuckles managed a jaundice yellow instead of a bone white.

It wasn't until the lamprey shot out of the water and trapped the edge of the boat under its dark mouth, crushing the wood in the sharp vacuum of its massive maw, that Murphy could no longer move. He sat petrified as the blind monster lashed its tail about in the water, rocking the boat precariously, wood splitting slowly under its endless rows of black teeth. Like Richards had, like Craig, like Murphy’s own flesh and bone, ripped and mangled so that his vision had flickered out with so much pain.

Then, the drone, who had bravely gone off to survey the surrounding sea some time before, to Murphy’s surprise, returned in a hurry. Out from a black lens in its crimson frame shot a net of bright lasers, scanning over Murphy, first, and then the lamprey. The drone paused, considering, and then flew off a little ways from the boat, which was still splitting under the monster’s violent attentions. Once it had gone as far as it deemed necessary, it sounded a single, tiny beep.

It was more than Murphy had offered, and the lamprey released the boat with a vicious tug backwards. The momentum sent Murphy pitching forward to land on his hands and knees, knocking his shoulders and chin hard against the next short bench.

He peeked over the side of the boat with wide eyes, watching as the drone led the thrashing creature far away with well-timed beeps and incredible speed, a flash of red darting over the waves until Murphy could no longer see it at all.

He waited, crouching on the floor of the rowboat and catching his breath, but the dark horizon remained long free of the lamprey and the little drone. With a disbelieving laugh and a strange sensation of grief, Murphy picked up the oars and began rowing again.

As the night wore on and Murphy’s muscles began to ache and strain, his now-soft palms callousing under the wood of the oars, he took a potentially dangerous moment to slide to the floor of the boat again and rest his head against the bench. Just for a minute, he thought. Just for a minute.

_Day Eighty-seven_

When he opened his eyes again, it was to the cream clouds of dawn and his little rescuer hovering overhead, peering down at him.

“Robot!” Murphy cried with a smile that made his dry lips crack, and reached out for the drone. It made a mechanical noise of distress as Murphy caught the body of it between his hands, but stopped its propellers’ spinning so as not to hurt him. Murphy brought the drone close and planted a smacking kiss on the top of it, at which the drone beeped in confusion, and then he released it again. It whirled high above the rowboat and hovered over him, watching.

Murphy felt giddy as he took up the oars once more, well-rested and pleased to have the little robot back for the journey. 

He knew he’d gone a bit nuts in the bunker, but his happiness was still as real as it had ever been. Maybe he’d always been nuts, doomed to kiss robots and paddle aimlessly on ’til he fell from the end of the earth. No matter; he was happy.

“Louis,” Murphy said as he began to row again, grinning up once more at the drone, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Out from its center came that net of green lasers again, quickly appraising Murphy from the top of his head to his chin.

The robot was scanning his smile, Murphy realized with another burst of ridiculous joy, and laughed as the robot made a small arc in the sky, tracing the shape of his mouth to express its own approximation of happiness.

Murphy had learned a bit about artificial intelligence from the video logs. He knew the robot had a core command motivating its actions, and that it could only simulate human emotions. This wasn’t all that strange to Murphy. Maybe the drone had found a bit of a kindred soul in him.

Heaving forth, Murphy rowed on. Hours passed, until the soft morning sun bloomed on into a fiery noon. It pushed sweat down onto his brow and sent it melting down his back, and only a bit of relief could be garnered by tossing his shirt to the floorboards. 

Eventually, as the heat and light continued to fry him, Murphy leaned over the side of the rowboat to dunk his head in the water, keeping a foot balanced on the other side of the dingy so that it might think twice about flipping over on him.

He opened his eyes under the murky water and saw nothing, save for the fuzzy green glow of the drone checking to see if he had drowned. A bubble floated from him and popped on the water’s surface as an amused huff escaped him, and he drew himself back out of the depths before some other awful creature darted up and ate his face.

His long hair stung his shoulders as he whipped it over his head and against his back, and the rivulets trickled down his spine in cool little rivers, soothing his slowly baking skin. Murphy dragged his shirt through the water as well and draped it over his head so it could keep him cool, and hopefully upright and seeing straight as the starvation and the heat sunk deeper and deeper.

Progress was slower that day, as Murphy paused frequently to retch over the side of the boat, or to close his eyes as his vision blinked out in protest of his current state. The drone checked on him often, usually concluding its scan by beeping in alarm. “I’m fine,” Murphy always insisted, waving a dismissive hand at the drone. “I’m fine.”

Noon soon turned into a blue afternoon that beat no less against Murphy’s skin, turned porcelain from his months inside the lighthouse, and then the blue gave way to a setting sun, just as blazing and magnificent on the horizon as it had always seemed to him.

If the world was all there was— no people, just this— there was a chance Murphy might have come to understand faith. There was a chance he might have believed in something himself.

Dusk came quietly as Murphy’s hands burned, and he released the oars to hold one of his palms close, brushing a thumb over the spreading blisters. He hissed as he peeled a bit of white skin away from one of the small sores, and let out at a self-pitying sigh as he thought about the way he’d be hurting all over tomorrow. 

It was a miracle he hadn’t already died, keeled over from dehydration or sun poisoning. He had always been hard to kill, for better or for worse.

The drone beeped, once, small and inquisitive, and then darted off. Murphy took up the oars once more to follow it, groaning as his muscles ached. He rowed forward, keeping an eye on the dark, glittering water for any suspicious movement. Not that he’d be able to do much of anything if another massive animal took an interest in playing with their food, but at least he’d have a moment to let his sorry excuse for a life flash before his eyes.

Murphy raised a brow as the drone came hurtling back into view, beeping rapidly and jerking itself in the direction he was already facing. It wanted him to hurry, and Murphy, despite its loyalties to the island of the lighthouse, trusted it. He paddled harder, faster, following the fading dot of red as his sight curled black and burnt around the edges.

He wasn’t sure how, and he wasn’t sure when, but soon Murphy blindly felt his oars hit ground, wood grinding against small, rolling pebbles. He released the oars and tried so hard as the world tilted forward to see. 

There was the vaguest ghost of shapes; tall, dark shapes that meant trees, buildings, anything but endless ocean. He must have gone off-course, perhaps north of the desert. That would mean trouble for finding his way home, but at least he didn’t have to trek through the minefield again.

He put a leg over the side of the boat to get out and drag it to the shore, his sight gone dark again as the world spun and his stomach clenched. His leg was submerged, the bottom of his boot sliding over shifting silt, and then Murphy took a step toward what he thought was the shore. With that first step went the last of his strength, and Murphy fell forward hard, hitting the water with a splash and going under.

So much for being hard to kill.

_Day Eighty-eight_

He woke to particles of dust dancing in a beam of sunlight, swarming him. It was a pretty thing; little white stars twirling and floating carelessly about in someplace that was soft under his back and cool on his skin.

But if in a cruel ending to a cruel life Heaven turned out to be real, there was no way Murphy would have ever been let in.

He sat up on the cot of woven fronds and dark animal furs, curling his hands around the wooden frame. His hands that were bandaged with strips of cloth, wet spots suggesting some kind of poultice had been applied to his blisters. He was shirtless, still, and he withered a bit as he took in the deep red of his skin. His arms, shoulders, and chest were badly burnt, tiny blisters budding underneath a sheen of clear, sticky salve, and he could imagine his face and back weren’t fairing much better.

But there was nothing to be done for it, here, now, in a place requiring immediate reconnaissance. 

The hut he was in was built of a lattice of branches that kept it ventilated and cool. There was a wooden shelf of handmade books and journals, and a long table across from the cot that was filled with corked bottles and jars, bundles of plants and tools crafted from scrap metal. 

By the cot was a small, rickety table, on top of which rested a full waterskin and a plate of food, offering some kind of cooked meat, beechnuts, an apple, and a chunk of cheese. By the plate lied an oozing, thick leaf, and when Murphy swiped his finger across the liquid it had the same consistency of whatever had been applied to his burns.

Suddenly, there was a crash outside of the hut like the sound of dropped dishes, and Murphy froze, muscles coiling tight. 

A young girl’s voice replied quietly to the even quieter scolding of an adult, all in a language that Murphy couldn’t understand, and it was then that his curiosity came to an abrupt halt.

He was in a Grounder camp.

Scrambling to his feet, Murphy yanked on his blue shirt folded by the bed and grit his teeth as the worn fabric ground against his sensitive skin with all the softness of sandpaper.

There was a backdoor nestled between two empty cots that sat waiting on either side of the darker end of the elongated hut, and Murphy took a stuttering step towards it, torn between getting out fast and taking some supplies. He wouldn’t make it much longer without food, without water.

Moving on auto-pilot, Murphy ransacked the hut for something to carry, digging through crates and baskets until he found a small rucksack. He dumped the waterskin and the contents of the plate inside, and stuffed the leaf of magical goo into it too. Scanning the hut one last time for anything else of use, Murphy grabbed what must have been a surgical knife from the long table and rushed to the door.

It protested under his hands, creaking back while he fruitlessly pushed, until he realized his mistake and unbarred it, throwing it open. 

He was thankfully on the outskirts of the camp, facing the forest, and raced toward the treeline with his heart pounding furiously in his chest and the rucksack beating against his back. The grass crushed quietly under his boots and a breeze hissed in the trees, and for that, he could run silently. For that, he was grateful.

Reaching the wooden fence, he shoved a long leg through the gap between the two rails, not keen on trying to leap over the top like he once might have been able to. He bent over and slid through the gap, and a pained gasp escaped him as his burnt chest brushed against the grain of the wood.

Once on the other side of the fence, Murphy glanced up as he backed into the trees to ensure no one had seen him. 

A young girl stood by the medicine hut, arms full of pots and pans, and stared at him. Murphy stared back, eyes wide and chest heaving. A tiny movement caught his eye, then, as the girl peeled a few fingers from her stack of cookware and gave him a little wave goodbye.

He turned and ran deeper into the forest, and didn’t stop until he had no choice, collapsing to his knees in a small, grassy clearing. After he’d caught his breath, he dug ferociously through the rucksack and guzzled nearly half of the waterskin before he stopped himself, thinking better of emptying it all at once.

Maybe they hadn’t meant any harm, Murphy thought as he placed the sack on the ground between his knees and spread the food out on it, tearing ravenously at the meat. Maybe they had only wanted to help him. They didn’t know who he was, after all. 

But the Grounders had recognized him as a Skyperson before, and that hadn’t gone quite spectacularly for him, had it? They could have been healing and feeding him so he’d live longer through the torture. They’d done that at the Trikru camp, too. 

He wasn’t an idiot. He wasn’t going to just trust the first person he saw. No matter if it had been so long. No matter if it was all he wanted right now; to be taken care of.

He slowed down eventually, no longer hunching over his food like an animal, and made his way gingerly around the green apple as he got up and began walking again, putting some more distance between himself and the camp.  He made sure to catch all of the dripping juice with his tongue, and to clean the apple down to its core, not wasting a bite of it. After all, he probably wouldn’t be getting anything this edible for some time to come.

Feeling on the brink of alive again, he strolled until the sun had set. There was food in his belly and water too, and he’d felt far worse pain than the sting of treated burns. He was sore and weak still, despite his rest, but it was all a bit more manageable. 

He supposed he’d slept in that medicine hut for a long time, well into the afternoon, as night fell not long after and soon he was tripping over his own feet in the darkness.  No such thing as too much rest, Murphy supposed, and settled down at the base of a tree, holding the knife in both hands to his chest and gazing blindly into the deep blackness of the woods, alone again with his thoughts.

Soon, he'd catch a scent and find his way back. They didn’t like him at Camp Jaha, and he didn’t care for them either, but it was the closest thing he had to a home. Murphy had learned his lesson about looking for somewhere to be happy. He’d just have to settle for someplace to be alive.

In the night, crickets chirped and the frogs burped and everything was so loud that it was quiet, and Murphy was still so tired. A familiar buzzing in the far distance soon lulled his eyes closed and willed him to relax, and Murphy smiled as the drone landed softly on the ground where he had slumped over, far too close to his face to be polite.

“Robot,” Murphy murmured, eyes half-lidded as the drone gave him another emerald once-over. “You came back.”

The drone peeped in agreement, and for the first time in a long time, Murphy fell asleep feeling like he might be okay.

_Day Eighty-nine_

Murphy walked.

Sometimes he sat down, on a rock or on the ground. His feet and legs ached fiercely. Sometimes he wanted to not get back up again. But he walked.

He found a patch of dandelions and gathered them into his rucksack, chewing on them as he moved ceaselessly forward over the earth. They tasted like nothing and felt like nothing, but humans could go a while without food. Water, though. Water would have been nice.

Night fell and he slumped against an oak tree with the drone sitting content by his hand, watching him reapply the salve he’d taken from the Grounders. Murphy would have thought it to be resting too, if not for the little blinking light in its frame that usually went a steady green when it was in sleep mode.

He felt less alone, even if it didn’t talk back. Most things never did.

_Day Ninety_

Something wet stung where it hit his burned, pink face. _Drip, drip, drip._ Murphy blinked awake, squinting at the white sky. _Drip._ He looked up into the clouds, slumped over on his side, and flinched as another raindrop plinked between his eyes.

Rain, he thought blearily, and then, holy shit, _rain!_

He opened his mouth to the sky and cupped his palms beneath it too, but he never got more than a tiny, desperate little sip that way. He shook himself out of his panic and thought of how else he might collect it, some way that it might not seep through his fingers so quickly.

Murphy hurriedly fell to his knees and patted around the dirt for his knife, piercing the soil with it and quickly digging a small hole. He then steadied himself against the tree he’d slept by and reached up to tear green leaves from their branches, and kneeled again to line the little hole in the ground with them, layering them atop each other until he’d made his best approximation of a bowl in the earth.

He watched carefully as the rain pattered into the hole, and barked out a laugh as a big, jiggling drop of rainwater collected at the bottom of it. It was soon halfway full, and Murphy scooped a hand in to drink from it, letting anything that slipped through his fingers return to the leaves. 

It might have been painstaking to wait for it to fill again if he were anyone but the person he was then, but as it was, Murphy was content to lie there all day on his stomach in the dirt, being pelted by a cool rain. 

The drone beeped unhappily, sitting under the sparse protection of the oak and spinning its propellers to flick the water from them, and Murphy smiled against his folded arms, amused and content.

By the time the rain let up, Murphy was thoroughly soaked, and had finished using another folded leaf to scoop as much water as he could into his waterskin before he began his trek again.

His boots squelched as the flat ground eventually made way for an upward slope that bent the old gray leather on his feet, which was somewhat promising in Murphy’s hope that he was traveling northeast. He remembered uneven ground, knolls and valleys, low mountains and high cliffs.

It was windier, wetter, and shadier that day, and Murphy did not long for the hot, wide-open clearings of days previous. Though the drone seemed silently perturbed about all the tree branches of the dense, dripping forest, flying low and keeping nearby for once.

With the drone close, Murphy couldn’t help but notice as he hiked that the little robot turned to him often, looking without scanning. What appeared to be a small camera lens was nestled in its dark frame, and the thought of being watched didn’t bother Murphy as much as he thought it should have. 

The drone had been good company so far, and Murphy was far from camera shy. If there was a person behind that camera, watching him sleep on the ground and piss in bushes, so be it. They must have been bored. Despite knowing the feeling, Murphy found he was too tired to do anything interesting to entertain them, and breathing too hard to acknowledge them with any quips or questions.

He slowed as the hill grew steeper and steeper, scattered with white rocks jutting out from the ground and thicker foliage crawling low over the soil, ivy and ferns and shrubs.

The drone took to the sky as Murphy stopped to rest, lowering himself onto a large, flat stone and watching the robot weave precariously through the branches. The drone smacked into a thin twig and beeped in frustration, at which Murphy snickered, before it burst free from the canopy and went exploring where Murphy could not follow.

He gave a heaving sigh, rubbing his aching calves with slow-healing hands. He caught a whiff of himself as he leaned up again, cringing at his own stench of dirt and sweat. He knew his beard was scraggly and his hair was matted, his fingernails dirty and his skin peeling, but the smell… he almost had the dignity left to be embarrassed by it.

Maybe he could clean up before getting back to camp. Otherwise the council might find themselves inclined to put him out of his misery, and theirs in turn.

That is, if they didn’t execute him for abetting in the theft of firearms and supplies with Jaha’s crew of fanatics, stacked onto his previous charges of, well, arson, assault with intent to kill, and double homicide. Then there were his Skybox infractions, and the whole Charlotte business, and the Finn thing, and the Raven thing. The Ark seemed unlikely to be opposed to un-pardoning, especially when it came to someone like Murphy, who was the model citizen for being useless and unlikable enough to risk making a fatal example out of.

His stomach grumbled just in time to interrupt him from straying down a dangerous path of thought, and Murphy leaned back on his hands with another sigh, glancing at his surroundings. There was never anything.

Never, except for then. Murphy blinked as he spotted a new color amongst the earth tones, small dots of pink in the distance. Berries.

“Hey,” he blurted, as if the bush might get up and run off. Rising slowly, he followed the color with no small combination of hope and doubt, unsure why he would ever be so lucky. He let out a gasp as he came close and recognized them as raspberries, and plucked one greedily from the shrub, turning it over in his dirty fingers. 

He remembered textbook pictures of them looking more vibrant, but the shape was definitely right, the texture, and God, he was starving.

Without giving it much more thought Murphy bit into it, leaning back and stifling a moan as it burst in his mouth with a pop of sweetness. He hurried to pick more, eating one for every handful that tumbled into his rucksack, and sent out a thank you to the universe.

Maybe it had decided not to hate him today.

There was as much of a skip in his trudging step as there ever could be as he continued his slow crawl over endless dipping and rising hills, and Murphy waved as the drone eventually fought its way through the canopy to return to his side.

“Check it out,” he greeted, digging a handful of the raspberries out of his rucksack and showing them off. The drone scanned them in a quick, sweeping arc of lasers, and began to sound off its rapid little beeps, but, strangely, aborted them before the set had reached its usual ten.

Maybe seven beeps just meant the drone was pleased. Murphy grinned, popping another berry into his mouth. Learning how the drone communicated had become a small pleasure for him. It felt like they were becoming friends. 

Months ago, he would have found that stupid— mental, even. Now, though, Murphy knew it was important to get them where you could find them. It also seemed clearer to him now that humans made the worst kinds of friends. After all, the drone would never betray him, never leave him.

Murphy hiked until the sun was low in the sky, bringing on violet clouds and the faint white curve of the moon, and it was then that something started to feel wrong.

His stomach had been clenching in on little to nothing, forcing him to double over with the pain of the contractions before he could continue walking. He was dizzy, a tightness in his jaw and his gut and his head. His vision was swirling, like when he’d been seasick and anxious on the rowboat with Jaha at the helm. His hands itched and burned up to his wrists, his skin turning pink and splotchy as if with a rash. All this, until the only thing he could think about was how badly he felt.

Murphy forced himself onward until night fell, and every few steps he was on his knees again, retching into the dirt. When he finally got something up it was no more than a small splatter of liquid that brought him no relief, and a sound of pain escaped him as his stomach chewed on itself again, as his throat burned.

The drone beeped unhappily, blades twirling amongst strange flashes of white light, and Murphy waved a limp hand. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” a voice replied, and Murphy blinked in surprise. “You’re going to die.”

He scrambled back against a tree, wincing as his burns stung from the grit of the bark through his shirt. “Who’s there?”

“You _should_ die,” Raven’s lost voice hissed.

Murphy’s breath sped up as he searched all around, darting forward on his hands and knees to grab the knife he’d dropped. He returned to the base of the tree in another painful rush of injured skin and rough earth, aiming the knife at nothing as his head pounded and his vision turned somersaults.

“You’ll die all alone,” she said in that wrong voice, as loudly as if she were inside his mind. “That’s what you get.”

He swore he saw her face then, flickering in the dark, as Murphy dropped the knife with a sudden, agonizing constricting of all his muscles. He tilted forward, clutching at his stomach, until his forehead was in the wet grass. He groaned and swallowed it down again as bile rushed up, and carried on making aborted sounds of hurt into the unhearing earth.

“Murphy,” he said from farther away than her, and Murphy could have cried, sliding his chin forward on the slick grass so he could look up and see him. 

Blurry in the dim moonlight, Bellamy stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down on him. “What are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you,” Murphy answered desperately, but couldn’t be sure if any words had come out, his mouth locked in a silent cry of pain.

Murphy could barely see him, but he knew Bellamy had frowned.

“Don’t,” he replied, taking a step back and wiggling at the edges like a heatwave, and Murphy squeezed his eyes closed and curled tighter in on himself, wishing he were shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. 

Then, graciously, his straining body went slack, and the world blinked out.

When he came to it was to the sting of a piercing needle, feeding off from a syringe filled with black liquid that was nearly to the bottom already. The drone held it in a little mechanical claw, having injected it into Murphy’s inner arm as he lay prone and paralyzed and sick on the cold ground. He tried to stop it, really he did, but he couldn’t move an inch.

“Mulberries,” the drone said in a robotic, feminine voice that was oh-too-familiar. “A common mistake in humans. When ripe, they are actually quite nutritious. I apologize. I overrode the drone’s warning having calculated that your consumption of a toxic substance would provide an early opportunity to perform this procedure without your interference.”

It emptied the syringe and unlatched from Murphy’s arm, folding up inside of the drone again. Murphy had always wondered why the body of it was so large, if all it held was a microscopic camera, some lasers, and a chip.

“Learning more about the fragility of the modern human psyche through your suffering has provided me with invaluable information, John,” said the voice, _her_ voice. “I am sorry for the pain our experiment has caused you, and that I cannot put an end to it, but losing my control variable in you may be at the detriment to all human life. For this reason you must remain in your natural body on Earth. I apologize, too, for this invasion, but you are soon to be one of the very few humans left in what will again become a highly irradiated environment, and precautions needed to be taken.”

Murphy wanted to thrash, to scream, to curse. It was all he could do to lay still with all his panic and stare at the drone, breathing raggedly as it hovered close and reached out with that mechanical arm again, and plucked another, thicker needle from his thigh.

“The paralytic should wear off quickly, and it is unlikely that you will experience any side-effects from the injection. Do not damage the drone. Its core command is to protect and guide you, as your data is invaluable,” instructed the A.I. for deaf ears. “Together, John, we will make life better for mankind.”

For a moment, he found he could twitch his limbs, shift them over the dirt even. Once he felt sure he could do so, Murphy shot up and dove wildly for the drone, which beeped in alarm, free of A.L.I.E.’s control, and darted away. Pitching forward, the world swirled and Murphy went lax again, passing out on his face in the dirt.

_Day Ninety-one_

On day ninety-one, Murphy rejoined a world that was more familiar. He pushed himself up on his hands, stomach still aching, dirt clinging to his face and hair, and took up a rock while the drone was in sleep mode, resting upon a stone. 

“I’m sorry, Robot,” he croaked, and the woken robot peeped curiously, giving a last little twirl of its propellers before Murphy brought the rock down as hard as he could. The metal and plastic of the drone’s core shattered under the force of it, and Murphy watched its tiny green light blink out.

He thought perhaps to say something else, to bury it or to take a part with him, but turned away in silence. He retrieved his knife and his rucksack, shook out the remaining mulberries, and continued on up the mountain into the morning fog.

He couldn’t go back to Camp Jaha, wouldn’t. That much was clear to him now. So he walked until the mist faded, and then the trees. After a few hours had passed he found himself on another tall hill overlooking a wide-open clearing, in this one, an old, rundown cabin, waiting empty. He could see a lake shimmering in the far, far distance, half-hidden by pines, and a dead garden by the house, one that could maybe be revived.

Murphy was lucky. He should have jumped for joy, should have laughed himself silly, should have called out to the robot and rejoiced with it.

Murphy skidded down the rocky path to the valley in silence, and wondered, with a deep pang of misery, how many times he would have to relearn his lesson.

It really was okay, though. He liked to be alone.

_Day 221_

Murphy was only halfway back to the house when the fire came.

It was late fall, and autumn leaves lit up the clearing in umber and auburn despite last night’s early snow crunching under his boots. 

The old hermit Murphy had found decayed facedown in the garden about two months ago, upon his discovery of the cabin, had plenty of winter clothes and a great mound of firewood under a tarp behind the house, so Murphy wasn’t worried about the cold. He just needed to keep stockpiling all the food he could, and thus his days went by in endless trips out to the woods, digging, foraging, checking his traps.

When the fire came, Murphy stood in the snowy field with two dead rabbits in his hands, and watched the great tangerine wave crawl over the forest. Old, massive trees cracked and buckled under it, turning black as it moved through them faster and brighter than any fire Murphy had ever seen.

The sound was earth-shattering, that of the endless woods crumbling and the animals stampeding into the valley. Murphy stood dumb as deer and rabbits and birds and squirrels and foxes tumbled into the clearing, taking care still to avoid him but ultimately pounding past him as if he were not there.

The edge of the forest crumbled, burnt, and crashed into the valley, shaking the earth beneath his feet as ash floated all around.

And Murphy folded, falling onto his knees as he watched the wave of fire curl around the lake and the trees and the fields of the valley, encircle them as if considering, and then move on. It soon reduced the rest of the forest and the mountains in the west to blackened desert, but had been somehow moved to leave him and his home untouched.

Murphy stayed on his knees long after it was gone, letting the snow soak through his pants, staring up at the orange sky. The fauna did the same, all finding a corner of the valley to be still and silent in until they were sure the rapture was over; until they were sure that they had been spared by whatever unseeable thing was out there, having resolved to blot out man of the earth, the beasts and creeping things, the birds of the sky.

In that moment they were all animals, one and the same.

_Day 284_

Winter was hard, but no harder than anything else had been.

Murphy wore the old hermit’s wool cloak down to the frozen lake and through the valley’s lower forest, the canopy a gleaming chandelier of icicles. 

He carried a bucket in one hand and a woven basket in the other, keeping his shovel strapped to his backpack, and stooped often to collect the fallen seeds of hornbeam hops, black walnuts, pine nuts and needles. If he was lucky, he would come across juniper or hawthorn berries, or a bright patch of mushrooms at the base of a tree.

He dug for roots and greens buried under the snow as he walked, usually coming up empty, but the one time he was pleasantly surprised by a nest of frozen cranberries beneath the thick sheet of white kept him trying.

The old hermit had an ancient textbook stowed in the crate beneath his rickety bed, one with pictures in it. Murphy memorized the shape and the color of everything, endlessly careful after the incident with the red mulberries last summer. Sometimes he still screwed up, eating something bitter or unripe, but nothing quite as scary as that first mistake.

It was surprising how much the forest was willing to give, if one knew what they were looking for. Murphy knew enough, if not vaguely and gullibly, and the forest provided with much the same attitude.

Murphy crouched by the spile he’d stabbed into a big maple, hefting up the bucket beneath the spile and replacing it with the empty one he carried. A gallon every three days wasn’t bad at all, and by the end of the month he’d have boiled it all down to a quart of syrup. He didn’t need it, really, but it killed time, made a good marinade for some of the less savory meat, and convinced the pine needle tea to be a little more bearable to drink. 

God, he hated tea, but he did responsible things now, like getting all the vitamins he needed even if boiled pine needles tasted like water gone sour and working until he felt the exhaustion in his very bones and always getting out of bed, even when he thought he would rather lay under the covers and die.

Murphy hiked the bucket onto his shoulder and stood up again, frowning as some of the sap splashed onto his cloak. Needed a better lid, he thought, and then his thoughts devolved into an ever-growing to-do list, like they so often did. Store the nuts, melt snow for tomorrow’s water, collect firewood, check the traps, skin the rabbits in the snowbank, cook the rabbits—

A snow flurry landed softly on his red nose, and Murphy crossed his eyes for a moment. He stopped his march up the path to the house, watching the flurries dance down from the gaps in the frozen canopy, where bright sunlight was streaming down.

Murphy hadn’t thought much of snowflakes last winter, disillusioned with the real world and chasing after a pipe dream through the cold desert. It was no more than frozen rain, making his fingers cold and his life harder. Now he could see that he’d been wrong. 

Snow served an unbiased purpose in nature, everything did. But Murphy had begun to wonder whether it just did some things to make him smile.

He shook the grin from his face, sitting his basket and sap bucket in the snow to fold his now-damp hair into a bun. He would cut it when winter passed, he swore.

Remembering to try and enjoy the feeling of the cold seeping into his skin, Murphy closed his eyes as he trekked back up to the cabin and thought less about all that needed to be done, and more about what wanted to be done.

Murphy had taken up whittling when he couldn’t sleep, and was actually kind of decent at it. Maybe he’d make some wind chimes to hang from the portico.

It could get awfully quiet in the winter.

_Day 426_

Just as the lake came into sight past the evergreens, Murphy started up grumbling again, wondering if he should just turn back around.

He felt incredibly stupid carrying the fishing rod and a foraging basket across the clearing, knowing he’d spend hours on the old dock and not catch a thing.

Either all the nice, helpful fish had died with the autumn fire, leaving only the ones who snapped Murphy’s line and stole his bait, or he was so spectacularly shit at fishing that he should have won an award for it.

He didn’t _have_ to waste a day hurtling curses at fish, but a plentiful spring had left him with more spare time in the summer than he’d expected, and Murphy wanted to _win._

He’d survived his first winter, but not without his fair share of hunger pains after the second month. He’d caught a cold that left him confined to the chair by the furnace, sneezing, coughing, and aching all over. Those five days of rest had dwindled Murphy’s reserves substantially, and left him scrambling for the rest of the season. He’d even stooped to eating bark, and, just— don’t get him started.

Murphy sighed as the dry, golden grass under his feet gave way to soft soil and shifting pebbles, and the sun beat down on his bare neck.

He’d cropped his hair fairly short in a compromise with the oppressive summer heat, and had shaved, albeit only close enough to leave him with a faint scruff. He wasn’t attempting anything closer with a plain old knife and the surface of a water bucket for a mirror.

It was strange to treat his body like a tool, but that’s what it was. It didn’t matter anymore how he looked, just whether he needed to be warm or cool, whether he was rested or tired, whether he was healthy or sick. It didn’t matter what the food tasted like, as long as he ate. It didn’t matter that his muscles ached, as long as they still worked.

It was strange to treat his body like a tool, but it was nice to always feel useful.

Coming upon the lake, Murphy was startled by the sound of something moving, thrashing in the dirt to his right, amongst the pine trees where one of the hermit’s more complicated traps usually sat un-triggered. The animal grunted, once, and Murphy jumped as it let out a frustrated shout that had, rather distinctly, not come from a rabbit.

He moved quietly, tightening his grip on the fishing rod and shifting slowly from tree to tree with practiced silence until he was right on top of the human, hiding a mere two pines away.

As soon as it became clear to him that the person was good and truly trapped, continuing to swear and grunt as it fought the snare, Murphy dove out from behind the tree trunk and thrusted the rod forward—

Only to find it wiggling between the eyes of Bellamy Blake.

He stopped fighting the trap at once, staring up at Murphy with wide brown eyes and a heaving chest. Murphy stared back, heart beating fast behind his ribs. A long silence stretched between them, and Murphy felt things he hadn’t felt in so long that he could hardly remember their names.

But he remembered terror.

“Murphy,” Bellamy said in that voice of his, rough and old and beloved like something antique to Murphy. Then he said it again in a helpless sacrifice of all his breath, recognizing something antique to himself, _“Murphy.”_

And Murphy wasn’t sure he could speak even if he’d tried. After staring soundlessly for a few moments too long, feeling a massive and complicated wave of emotion building in his throat and rendering him mute, Murphy snapped his bewildered gaze to the ground. 

He lowered the fishing rod to the dirt and kneeled where Bellamy’s ankle was tied up in the whip snare, picking uselessly at the knot as his mind turned over a million thoughts per second. Some still-functioning part of him told him this wouldn’t work, so he took his switchblade from his pocket and sawed at the old cord, feeling his breaths come faster as inexplicable tears began to wet his cheeks.

He kept his face resolutely down, feeling Bellamy’s stare boring holes into his head, and sat back on his heels as the cord finally snapped. Bellamy pulled his leg in and rubbed at his ankle, and Murphy couldn’t just… kneel there with his head ducked, pretending he couldn’t speak.

He looked up tentatively, and felt his breath catch as Bellamy’s frown slowly turned over into a sad little smile at the sight of Murphy’s tears. “All this time?” he asked, with all the gentleness in the world, and Murphy let out a sob that made him hot with horror.

All this time.

Murphy had stopped waiting long ago, stopped wishing in the dark that someone would just stumble across him and make it so that he wouldn’t have to beg; wouldn’t have to fear for his life in a village or be turned away at an encampment. He could shed the lonely and not feel pathetic for it, because for once he was invited, and he was needed.

He so rarely let it be Bellamy that wound up at the front door in want of something, Bellamy that forced him home. So rarely, in the fear that he would cling to the fantasy and not be able to shake himself off from it. It would have been all too easy to close his eyes and forever dream of someone coming to take all of the silence away; to never get back up again, waiting to be saved from himself.

Bellamy sat quietly as Murphy tried desperately to pull himself together, knowing he must have looked about as insane as he was, threatening Bellamy with a fishing rod and then bursting into tears.

After a few gulping breaths and some rough drags against his face with the sleeves of his flannel, Murphy picked his head up and gave another careful glance at Bellamy, afraid he’d disappear.

“Are—“ he started, and blushed furiously as his voice came out in a horrible croak, rusty with disuse and thick with emotion. Bellamy just kept smiling, eyes gleaming with a million questions. “Are you hungry?” Murphy managed, sounding about a thousand years old.

“Starving,” answered Bellamy, standing up and brushing himself off. He was wearing his same old clothes, save for a light jacket tied around his waist and a familiar pair of goggles hanging around his neck. His raven hair was long and shaggy, curling under his ears and falling over his forehead, and he looked gaunt, tired, and like he probably wasn’t kidding about the starving.

Murphy found, suddenly, that he had a million questions himself.

“Good,” he replied, picking up his rod and turning out of the trees to fetch his basket from the dock as Bellamy followed. “I really didn’t feel like fishing.”

Bellamy gave his own rusty laugh from behind him as they climbed up the yellow hill and Murphy’s heart jumped in his chest again, back to pounding hard.

He knew it wasn’t the mulberries, knew it because he’d picked them ripe this season, knew it because he could hear Bellamy’s boots crunching over grass and wildflowers, knew it because he could hear his breaths coming short and fast with exhaustion or shock. If he turned he would see him, clear as anything else that was real.

Despite this surety, Murphy didn’t know which possibility terrified him more.

At the top of the hill he climbed the steps to the cabin and pushed open the creaking door, and held it for Bellamy, who was already smiling again.

Murphy’s hand drifted to scratch at his own arm as he watched Bellamy look around, leaning over to inspect the jars of syrup and herbs on the windowsill, grinning at some of his roughly whittled animals, reaching out to touch the blankets on Murphy’s bed and drawing his hand away at the last second.

“Nice place,” he murmured, sounding strangely pleased, and Murphy quickly moved to the dark storage room in the back of the small cabin before he turned around to address Murphy. So he could put together something for Bellamy to eat, not to hide. Certainly not to hide.

He laid out a few strips of dried squirrel on wood sorrel greens, and sighed as he realized he was going to give Bellamy the last of his blueberries. He returned tentatively to the main room, frustrated with himself for suddenly feeling out of place in his own home.

Bellamy was sitting in the chair at the table, looking out of the window at the garden even as the sun blazed blindingly against the old glass. Murphy pushed the plate onto the table in front of him while he was distracted and darted away again, returning to the storage room to fill up a tin with water.

“This is really good,” came Bellamy’s voice from the other room through a massive mouthful of food, and Murphy smiled hopelessly at the water bucket. “Thank you, Murphy.”

“Um, yeah,” Murphy forced out, bringing the water to the table, which Bellamy snatched from his hand and began to guzzle until Murphy instinctively reached out and snatched it back.

They stared at each other for a moment, before Bellamy’s surprised expression split into another ridiculous grin. “Right,” he said, thumbing a rivulet of water from his chin. “Shouldn’t drink it all at once.”

Relieved Bellamy had spoken for him, Murphy let out the breath he was holding and returned the water to the table. He caught himself feeling something like fond as Bellamy tore his eyes away from the tin and forced himself to eat slowly.

He’d never been very good at this kind of thing in the first place, but after over a year of total isolation, Murphy was obviously sorely in need of a refresher on social skills. 

Though it seemed that Bellamy didn’t mind, as a man who Murphy remembered to have communicated mostly in grunts and short, aggressive gestures anyway. He was also always business first, demanding the answers that would quell his curiosities.

“How’d you do it?” he asked. “Beat the death wave.”

Murphy, choosing to stop shuffling his feet like a moron and having moved to sit on the end of his bed, crinkled his brows. “You mean the fire? Last fall?”

“It wasn’t fire, Murphy. It was radiation. How the hell did you survive that?” Bellamy had stopped eating, miraculously, and stared incredulously and with great suspicion at Murphy, like he had performed an impossible magic trick and refused to share his secret.

“It went around the valley,” he explained. “Had nothing to do with me.”

“But why? How?” Bellamy started, shaking his head. “And the radiation in the air… unless somehow you’re…” Sitting back in his chair, Bellamy gave up, and simply gazed at Murphy like he was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. “I don’t think I’ll ever figure you out, Murphy.”

Murphy shrugged, and privately wondered what there was left of himself to puzzle out. It seemed Bellamy was the only one he’d ever met who felt as if he hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it; the only one who ever made Murphy feel like he had secrets.

“What about you?” he retorted, feeling braver. But Bellamy’s inquisitive expression fell, and Murphy regretted his bravery much sooner than he thought he would.

“Some of us made it to A.L.I.E.’s lab, well, you don’t know who that is… long story,” he sighed. “We ran some nightblood serum tests, it only really took with me, and now I’m, you know, immune. To radiation.”

“Nightblood,” Murphy repeated, and looked down at his hands, remembering stray fishhooks and sharp wire and blistered palms, all bleeding black after that injection from the drone.

“I don’t know how long you’ve been… Well, we’re the only ones left, you know. They’re all dead,” Bellamy said darkly. “I mean, Octavia’s in the bunker, and Clarke and a couple of the others took a rocket up to the Go-Sci ring, but—“

“They left you?” Murphy blurted, and felt a difficult way about how that made him feel; angry that they would abandon him, hopeful that maybe someone understood.

“I didn’t make it,” Bellamy explained, a little bit of resentment in his voice, turning back to his plate to fold the sorrels up between his fingers. “Somebody had to stay behind and open the hangar.”

They left him, Murphy thought, watching Bellamy openly as the man stared at the floor. They left him all alone on a nothing world.

They sat in pensive silence until Bellamy finished eating, and the silence after that was heavier still. How did one excuse themselves when they were, in a sense nothing short of literal, the last two people on Earth?

Bellamy explored his things some more, seeming reluctant to leave anyway, and sent curious, sidelong glances to Murphy despite his silence. Murphy, who took a block of wood from the crate under his bed and whittled, made all the harder by his trembling hand.

“Woah,” Bellamy exclaimed suddenly, tracing a finger across the spines of the three books in the cabinet by the door. The green one was the textbook on native plants, the yellow a guide to hunting and trapping, and the red looked to be a general wilderness survival manual, but hadn’t enough pictures to garner Murphy’s trust. “I bet these are a lifesaver.”

Murphy hummed in agreement, and then glanced up in alarm as Bellamy let one of the books fall with a loud thump onto the cabinet shelf, breaking their precedent of quiet.

“You’ve got it all figured out, huh?” Bellamy said, maybe aiming for friendly, but his voice wavered with clear frustration. He kept his back to Murphy and stared hard at the sparse set of books, and Murphy watched the tense line of his shoulders, wondering if he had anyplace to go.

“Not really,” Murphy answered, lowering his knife to the bed. “Just trying to survive.”

Bellamy nodded sharply, and made a move to grab his backpack from the floor. “I should get out of your hair,” he mumbled, quick and quiet as he hefted the bag up. “I’m sure you’re busy. With your house, and your garden, and… sorry, I… sorry.“

“Wait,” said Murphy, feeling his breath come fast again at the thought of Bellamy going away and leaving him alone again. Before he knew what he was doing he was up, and they were both staring at Murphy’s hand, wrapped tight around the other strap of the backpack. “I could use some help.”

They looked up at once, and Bellamy met Murphy’s eyes with another one of those fragile half-smiles on his mouth. “Why do I doubt that?”

“Please,” Murphy all but begged, hanging onto that backpack for dear life. Bellamy’s eyes warmed as they searched Murphy’s, and hopefully found what Murphy was really trying to say when he blurted, “I really hate fishing.”

_Day 429_

It was another cruelly hot day, but the potatoes’ leaves had wilted to request harvesting, so Murphy wore his thinnest clothes and got down on his knees in the garden soil, ripping them up by their limp greens.

It had been a warm spring, so Murphy was able to get away with mistakenly planting them a few months ago and not having to learn his lesson about sowing summer tubers in spring the hard way.

Finding a massive stash of packaged seeds buried under the fishing tackle at the beginning of spring had changed everything about living in the old cabin on the hill, but the blessing also seemed content to be a curse when it could, dishing out a thousand more opportunities to make Murphy fail and flounder in playing the good farmer.

He reached up to wipe sweat from his brow and then shook off the sweet potato in his grasp, letting the remaining dirt crumble off before adding it to the basket between them.

“You know what would go good with these?” Bellamy asked suddenly, reaching to the middle of the garden bed to add a potato to the pile growing in a woven basket. “Tomatoes.”

Murphy raised a brow at him, but Bellamy was busy digging. He wore one of the hermit’s t-shirts, one that was too big for Murphy and hung off of Bellamy’s frame too. Murphy tried his very hardest not to look down Bellamy’s shirt. “Is that right?”

He’d given him the shirt after Bellamy had nearly keeled over from the heat the day previous, as Murphy led him around the valley so they could clear all the traps in one go. Murphy felt neglectful as he turned around and extended a rabbit to no one, as Bellamy had slunk off to go and lean miserably against a tree in his dark ensemble that must have served him well right up until the summer.

So he’d lended him a t-shirt and the single pair of the hermit’s cargo shorts, the pair that Murphy always had to tie up with fishing line or paracord so they’d stay on his waist. He’d just roll up his jeans now, which suited him better anyway.

The incident had reminded Murphy of where Bellamy had come from; out from the wastelands, dirty and starving and weak, like Murphy had been once. So that day they left the hunting and the foraging be, and Murphy pretended to need help in the garden. Bellamy seemed content to sit on his knees and scour for vegetables, and if he noticed Murphy was going easier on him, he didn’t appear to take offense.

“They’re sweet, aren’t they?” Bellamy replied in consideration of his proposed dish, and Murphy laughed; a rough, unfamiliar sound.

“I don’t think that’s how…“ he began, but glanced up to find Bellamy had stilled his digging and was looking up at him from under his brows, something pleasant in his expression even if he wasn’t quite smiling. “What?”

“Nothing,” he answered, averting his gaze and resuming his digging. “Just listening.”

Hesitantly, Murphy returned to excavating potatoes and explaining how he thought food pairing worked, thoroughly distracted from the smothering heat by the time Bellamy had finally almost repeated the five basic tastes correctly.

“Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, salami.”

“Umami,” Murphy said again, feeling a faint prickle of amusement and adding the last potato of his side of the garden bed to their cumulative pile. 

“Umami,” repeated Bellamy, shortly followed by a huff of breath. “That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of that.”

He finished his side as well, stooping to gather the basket and follow Murphy to the front of the cabin where a bucket of well water sat waiting in the shade cast by the portico.

“Well, it’s a thing,” Murphy rebutted, hefting up the water bucket and tilting it over the potatoes that Bellamy had dumped onto the grass, washing away the rest of the soil and splashing Bellamy a bit on accident.

“Ah,” Bellamy sighed, dragging his wet hands down the sides of his freckled face. “Anything left in there for me?”

Murphy held the half-full bucket out to him, and felt a little jealous as Bellamy had the genius idea to kick off his boots and tip the bucket over his head, sighing with relief as the cold water washed over him.

There were other things to be done that day, and Murphy couldn’t very well do anything productive in the cabin if he was sopping wet, lest he leave a giant mess to clean up, and his jeans would take ages to dry…

Bellamy swiped the hair back from his eyes and gave Murphy a little grin, wiggling the bucket suggestively, and Murphy had already lost.

“Alright,” he sighed. “Hit me.”

Obligingly, Bellamy slammed Murphy with a wall of freezing water and chuckled as Murphy gasped and spluttered, reaching out blindly to shove him in the chest.

“You told me to,” Bellamy said innocently, releasing the bucket and kneeling to roll the potatoes apart evenly in the sun so they could dry. Then he lowered himself to the yellow grass too and lay down, closing his eyes to the light and looking endlessly peaceful.

After wicking the water from his eyes and shaking himself off, Murphy mimicked him. He lay down a few feet away and spread out his arms, let the sunlight fill him up and warm his bones. 

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d just laid around. It made him go crazy, being still and alone with his thoughts. Not now, though. Not when Bellamy was doing it too, and it felt like resting upon the earth instead of sinking into the ground.

“Hey, Murphy?” asked Bellamy, after enough time had gone by that Murphy had begun to drift off.

“Yeah?”  


There was a silence, and then Bellamy rustled a bit in the grass. “Nothing.” He paused again, and then, tightly, he asked, “Do you think you’ll need help for long?”

Murphy felt warm all over. “I’m not big on emptying the traps.”

“I can do that,” Bellamy agreed, another stupid smile in his voice.

Murphy had wanted to be a lot of things in his life— really anything but himself— but for the moment thought it rather good just to be a potato drying in the sun.

_Day 445_

Bellamy was sitting at the end of the dock with his broad back to Murphy telling another story, this one about vicious sandstorms, when Murphy first and finally fucked it all up.

“Couldn’t see anything,” Bellamy said with a fishhook between his teeth which clinked as he spoke around it, digging relentlessly through the tackle box. “Even with Jasper’s goggles on. Damn near could have bowled me over if I’d tried to get up and walk. You’d hate it, just sitting there getting pelted by sand.”

“I did hate it,” Murphy replied, lounging with the old wood planks under his back and basking in the sun. He rested more often with Bellamy around to pick up the slack, who actually seemed to enjoy working. 

He especially liked fishing, so much so that sometimes Murphy would wake up and do his chores until nearly sundown without seeing him, Bellamy having snuck out of his bedroll in the storage room at dawn to take the rod and tackle down to the lake. They ate a lot of fish now. Murphy, strangely, didn’t have the heart to tell Bellamy to give it a rest.

At Murphy’s flippant comment Bellamy turned around sharply, looking confused. “When?” he asked, and Murphy averted his gaze from strong shoulders to the bobbing of the orange fishing float out on the water, in case it dipped under and Bellamy missed it.

“We got hit with one on the Chancellor’s little field trip to the City of Light. Probably would have hated it more if I hadn’t been so damn tired. I think I fell asleep sitting up.” Murphy grimaced at the thought of it, tiny grains of sand stinging sharp against his face, wind whipping at his back, surrounded by the guts and gore of the travelers blown sky high by the mines. That had been a restless sleep.

Murphy’s eyes flitted from the float and back to Bellamy as he sat in silence, staring at Murphy like he was an unsolvable equation again.

It was then that Murphy realized he hadn’t told Bellamy where he’d disappeared to. Bellamy had last seen him shoving himself against the barrel of Raven’s gun, doing his damnedest to help save a boy waiting to be led like a serial killing lamb to the slaughter without being sacrificed himself, and then never again. Not until he’d found himself with his foot snared in a trap at the edge of the valley.

“You used to talk more,” Bellamy said after a beat, sounding a bit sad. Then he turned around again to watch the orange float, falling silent for the first time in two weeks.

Suddenly, and with a pang that made his chest raise up in a big breath and sink low again, Murphy felt like a disappointment. Had he been funnier once? Had he been more interesting? Had Bellamy liked him more?

Then, like it was wont to do, Murphy’s insecurity boiled to a bubbling anger at some unfairness that he couldn’t have put a finger on.

“You used to talk less,” he snapped, sitting up on his elbows, which ground uncomfortably into the old gritty wood of the dock. Bellamy glanced over his shoulder again, an unreadable expression on his face as he regarded the swift return of Murphy’s cruelty.

“I’m sorry,” said Bellamy, looking like he wanted to sneer. “Didn’t know I was bothering you so much. I’ll try to shut up once in a while.”

Murphy went pale, sitting up fully as Bellamy turned away again and started reeling in the unbitten bait as if to leave. “That’s not— I didn’t—“ Murphy stuttered, and found himself at a familiar but old kind of loss. The kind that happened when Murphy let his mouth get ahead of him, and he stared helplessly as Bellamy packed up the tackle.

“I’ll make dinner tonight,” Bellamy said as he stood up and leaned the fishing rod against his shoulder, making his way down the dock. Murphy said nothing as Bellamy’s big boots clomped past him where he sat, eyes averted to the planks beneath him.

Only when Murphy could no longer hear him go, his footsteps disappearing in a last whisper of crushed grass over the hill, did Murphy breathe again, beating the side of his fist against his own head in frustration.

He knew. He knew why Bellamy sought conversation now, having been lonely in his silent travels over an earth all but devoid of life. He knew that, and he hadn’t meant to be cruel about it, or to treat it like so many of the secrets he’d thrown and shattered to use the shards of them like weapons.

But Murphy, on the other hand, had forgotten how to want, how to need. It wasn’t fair that Bellamy would ask anything of him, that he would pretend to be _sad_ over what Murphy thought was an offering of blissful silence, when Murphy asked for nothing. How could he _hate_ Murphy, and demand more of him too?

The bunker had made Murphy small, dried him up and turned his spirit into a raisin of itself. He didn’t need to be happy, didn’t need to talk, didn’t need to feel peace. He just needed to live. That’s all there was to be done. Bellamy didn’t get a say in that.

But latches had clicked apart inside him when he and Bellamy had found each other in the pines. He’d needed company, wanted it desperately. He’d felt the relief bubble up from _someplace_ deep inside, someplace that had been yearning in secret, a silent but yawning maw. He had to acknowledge that Bellamy’s wants weren’t demands, had to acknowledge that they were reasonable, even if upsetting to Murphy.

Bellamy of the Wastelands had the _someplace_ too, but he always was quicker to take care of things than Murphy, at least if one wanted them done right. So he talked, stories and confessions and complaints and ideas, and Murphy liked it. He liked it so much, and hadn’t meant for Bellamy to shut up at all. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if his world went quiet again.

He stayed on the dock until the horizon was fading, turning a soft violet past the swaying cattails and the tall grass around the water. It was his house, but he would wait.

Bellamy was making dinner, and Murphy knew what that meant. _“Don’t come until the food is cold and I’m in another room. I don’t want to thank you for cooking, I don’t want to see you at all.”_

It scared Murphy how easy it was for Bellamy to make him sick with dread. _“I’ll make dinner tonight.”_

When a sheet of stars had peeled over the sky, Murphy trudged up the hill and steeled himself at the cabin door. A tentative push on the wood revealed not an empty table and a makeshift curtain pulled closed on Bellamy’s sorry excuse for a bedroom, but a hearty fire and two plates set out, waiting.

Bellamy was ladling something from the little pot over the fire into a clay mug, pretending he hadn’t heard Murphy come in, who stood by the door until Bellamy had topped off both mugs and placed them on the table. 

Bellamy stared at the table with his brows furrowed, and then grunted as if remembering something, disappearing behind the curtain to the tiny storage room that moonlighted as a tiny bedroom.

Murphy glanced at the plates, feeling a smile twitch on his lips at the sight of badly burnt meat, crumbling black onto unappealing stacks of sweet potato leaves, and the fox grapes Murphy had foraged yesterday, arranged into strange circles surrounding the rest of the food.

He stood behind the chair closest to the door where he always sat, feeling ridiculous for being anxious about whether he should take his seat or not. Obviously the second plate wasn’t for anyone else; there was, quite literally, no one else on Earth it could be for.

Then, “Shoes off,” Bellamy called at last, like he always did when Murphy came in with his boots on. Murphy’s lips finally pulled up into a smile as he shook his head and toed his boots off, leaving them by the door next to Bellamy’s bigger pair.

He took his seat and poked his food around until Bellamy returned, pulling out the chair across from him and settling with his back to the fire so that it casted its tangerine halo around the shape of him. 

He was beautiful sometimes, Murphy thought a little helplessly, beautiful like terrifying things often are. Bellamy was lions and wildfires and mountains and mushroom clouds from nuclear explosions that destroy the Earth, twice. He was anything that could make Murphy’s eyes wide and his heart fast and his hands sweat, and Murphy didn’t scare easily.

“Thank you for cooking,” Murphy murmured, and swallowed tightly. Bellamy avoided his gaze, looking down at the burnt catfish slab and probably thinking of what to say to punish Murphy for his earlier hostility.

“I guess there’s finally something you’re better at than me,” Bellamy muttered at last, and at that Murphy blurted a laugh, surprised and undeserving. Something like a bashful smile melted along Bellamy’s lips in reply, and he let out a small breath that sounded inexplicably of relief.

“Don’t worry,” replied Murphy with a lingering, wry smile, stabbing the blackened fish with his fork. “It’s probably the only thing.”

Bellamy had gotten to work sawing into his food as well, staring holes into his charcoal-dusted potato leaves even as Murphy began to steal a few glances up at him. “How did you get to be a good cook?” Bellamy asked, genuine as ever.

Murphy shrugged, spooning a grape into his mouth and breaking Bellamy’s confusing plating of what he assumed was a circle of protection around the rest of his meal. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day?”

“You’re not a broken clock,” Bellamy said softly.

That was nice, Murphy thought, snapping his gaze up to meet Bellamy’s eyes for the first time that night and finding that same gentle curiosity there that he always did. Though there was a patience there that hadn’t ever been before, like Bellamy had decided something was in need of mercy in Murphy’s absence. 

He should have been shouting, scolding, insulting Murphy. Instead he’d cooked for him, made it easy, said kind things that Murphy didn’t deserve to hear.

“I’m sorry,” Murphy blurted suddenly, surprising himself and Bellamy, too, whose brows jumped. “I didn’t know it mattered,” Murphy explained, turning his face down to scratch at his plate with the fork.

Bellamy blinked, exchanging his understanding and solemn expression for one of confusion. “You didn’t know what mattered?”

Murphy let go of his fork and wrapped his hands around the edge of the gnarled table, drumming his fingers against it and feigning cool. “I didn’t know you’d want me to talk about… you know, where I went, crap I did. I didn’t know it mattered.”

The other man looked thoughtfully at the top of Murphy’s head for a moment that felt terribly long, and then said, “Believe it or not, Murphy, I do like to hear what you have to say. Crap and all.”

With a thrumming heart, Murphy shrugged again, shooting him a guarded look that Bellamy caught in warm hands. “It’s a long and fraught story, and not at all flattering to my image,” he warned.

“Not much you do is,” Bellamy teased, dredging up an eye-roll and a grin from Murphy that he hid behind his mug of that godforsaken pine needle tea. “It really couldn’t get any worse, could it?”

So, with his chest beating nearly apart, Murphy undid one more latch and let the words spill forth. He left out no snide remark, no trembling anger, no wounds that still bled, and Bellamy listened like it was a song he’d been waiting to hear.

_Day 531_

A month into Bellamy’s arrival, he managed to finally convince Murphy to venture off of the yellow hill and into the village at the far end of the valley in search of supplies.

They’d found themselves with some more fishhooks, a new set of kitchen knives, an axe, a harmonica for Murphy, and a notebook and pencils for Bellamy. Why he wanted them Murphy didn’t know, nor did he ask after the look he’d received when suggesting Bellamy use them to finally start his diary.

They had also discovered thirty-nine skeletons, and five chickens pecking at the gray bones of them.

“This is so stupid,” Murphy panted, stooping to grab another wayward hen off the hillside and stuff it into his arms. The rest of the tiny flock clucked unhappily as Bellamy chased them, taking wide steps this way and that and spreading his arms out to herd them the rest of the way across the valley. The valley which had finally begun to sweep upward after nearly an hour of this ridiculous dance.

“We’re almost there,” Bellamy encouraged, breathing hard himself, and if Murphy hadn’t been so winded he might have laughed himself sick at the sight of Bellamy sheep-dogging some seriously displeased hens and one bloodthirsty rooster. “Think of the eggs.”

So Murphy thought of the eggs, grimacing as one of the belligerent hens in his arms became frustrated and flapped her wings wildly in his face, smacking him senseless with a fan of white feathers.

By the time they had reached the top of the hill, Murphy wondered if maybe they should have thought of a little more than the eggs. After realizing they had nowhere to keep the birds, Bellamy and Murphy began dragging their clothes and blankets out of the cabin, and replaced them with chickens.

They would spend two weeks building a pen and a coop out of sticks and wire behind the house, leaving the chickens safe inside the cabin where they shat on furniture to their hearts’ content. 

On the first night Bellamy and Murphy prepared to sleep under the stars, their home having been overrun by corpse-eating chickens, Murphy finally laughed himself sick.

Bellamy lay with his arms crossed peacefully behind his head, shining under a waning moon and smiling at Murphy’s face going pink with hysterical, disbelieving laughter. “Eggs,” he promised, grinning with teeth and all.

“Eggs,” Murphy agreed as soon as he could breathe again, hugging his chest and wondering if it would be possible to feel like this forever. “Eggs, eggs, eggs.”

_Day 552_

The rain came down in blowing sheets that peeled the autumn leaves from their branches, and just as he thought the leaves might flutter off into the air and do some kind of pointless, lovely dance, the rain pinned them gently to the soil. 

He had learned to listen to the weather, and today it wanted them all still.

Now if he really had to work, even nature’s pattering demand for a sabbath day wouldn’t have kept him from it. His newfound respect for the Earth’s wishes had never come before his own and never would, and he hoped that was a deal that had been clearly struck. He thought it had, though the Earth had no qualms about soaking him to the bone and sucking his boots into deep puddles of mud when he did not deign to acknowledge those demands.

The fall crops getting their fill of the downpour, shrinking under the light abuse of the rain but no doubt happy, were acceptably leafy and viciously green this season. There was no shortage of dried meat, fish and hare alike, nor that of wild things, greens and berries and tubers. The rainwater barrels filled themselves, and the chickens were feasting like monstrous things on a head of cabbage, congregating under the protection of the old tarp Murphy had thrown over the wire roof of their pen.

Bellamy sat by the window and scratched numbers into his journal, muttering to himself about the upcoming green onion harvest.

They’d wanted to save firewood for the winter seeing as they both hated chopping it, so the cabin was a bit cold with the early autumn rain. Murphy lied content in his bed across from the table, watching Bellamy write with his cheek in his flat pillow and the thick plaid blankets tugged up to his ears.

“Getting up anytime soon?” Bellamy asked without looking up, and Murphy shifted his lazy gaze to the gray sky out of the little window over the table, finding the sun’s blossom of white light behind the clouds in the south, indicating noon.

“Still morning,” Murphy grumbled, voice still thick with sleep despite having lain awake for what must have been an hour now. Bellamy was an early riser, and always took care to bumble about quietly in the morning, which Murphy appreciated.

Except on foul-weather days that kept him inside, as Bellamy could only contain himself for so long. By the time a blue dawn had melted orange, he began whipping short curtains aside and letting soft streams of groggy sunlight wash in, noisily plating breakfast and setting pine needle tea to a bubbling boil over the crackling cooking fire. 

Sometimes, when he and Murphy had been getting along particularly well, Bellamy would lean over the bed and scrub his hand through Murphy’s disheveled hair, cheerily insisting that he get “Up and at ‘em,” which made Murphy want to scream. Once he had even whipped the blankets off of Murphy, but had smartly never done that again.

“Noon,” Bellamy nagged, and Murphy rolled his eyes, turning his back to the table and pulling the covers over his head.

"I'm old, Gandalf."

To the sound of ceaseless graphite scratching on old paper, he’d begun slipping off into a half-dream in which he was ice-fishing through a hole in the floor in the cabin, when Bellamy roused him again, asking, “Do we have a ruler?”

“No,” Murphy answered sleepily, muffled by the blankets. “Why?”

“I was thinking I could make a rain gauge,” Bellamy suggested, despite being in the middle of three other building projects. These plans consisted of constructing a separate pen for Ares the rooster, who was a dick and clearly needed to be separated from the hens; a room for himself off of the back of the cabin; and a bed for said room, thankfully, as Murphy was starting to feel guilty about having him sleep on the floor and couldn’t very well sneak anymore of his own blankets into Bellamy’s pallet without soon finding himself in lack of one.

“Why the hell would you want a rain gauge?” Murphy asked, lifting the covers from his head and twisting to look at Bellamy over his shoulder.

“Figuring out, you know, weather patterns, average rainfall by season. Then we’ll start to know for certain when to plant certain things, and it’ll help the others get started with their own crops when they come back down,” he replied, poking his tongue between his lips as he hunched over the notebook and erased something.

Murphy watched him write for a moment, and then rolled his eyes again, disappearing once more under the covers.

He was always saying things like that— “When they come down,” “When the others come back,” “When they get out of the bunker,” “When the five years are up”— like he had one foot in the now and the other foot in some perfect future where everyone was back together again and they all lived happily ever after.

Murphy tried not to think about what that meant for him; tried not to think about what he’d do with the empty bedroom, if Bellamy ever finished it.

Unable to fall back into a dream, Murphy turned over and swung his legs over the bed’s edge, sighing. Bellamy looked up at once, eyes traveling over Murphy’s goosebumped legs and his bare feet on the cold floor, his tired face and his hair roughed into porcupine spikes. Then he smiled, always ever so pleased that Murphy was able to drag himself out of bed, and got up from his chair so they could finally make breakfast.

Murphy dressed facing the wall, listening to the rain tapping on the window and the creak of the door as Bellamy brought in a log of firewood. He turned and sat himself on the bed to pull his socks on just as the wood burst into an orange flame, sending sparks swirling into Bellamy’s squinting face. 

They would have eggs again, and maybe some hickory nuts. Murphy tried to eat light but Bellamy liked to have meat with most meals, so maybe he’d resurrect a bit of the dried rabbit.

He paused, a pot and a pan dangling at his sides, to look at the swimming letters and numbers of Bellamy’s open journal. “Georn onoin harsvet, 50 seeps blatned,” it read.

Yeah, big help that would be after Bellamy was gone.

Murphy had gotten the water for the rabbit boiling and shelled the hickory nuts into a bowl they could just share, instead of dirtying both of them, by the time Bellamy returned noisily from the coop with another rattle of the door and a sopping raincoat dripping from the hook at its side, rolling four eggs onto the table. Murphy cracked them into the pan, and then furrowed his brows as Bellamy grabbed the back of one of the chairs and made to leave with it.

“Where are you going?” he asked, privately cursing at the worry in his voice.

“Nowhere,” Bellamy answered, furrowing his brows back. “Thought you’d want to eat under the portico again, since it’s raining.”

Whenever Bellamy had realized Murphy liked to sit under the overhang and watch the rain, Murphy didn’t know, let alone when Bellamy decided he’d like to start joining him.

Murphy turned on the cooking stool to face the fire again, feeling strangely pleased. “Yeah,” he agreed. “That’d be good.”

The door creaked open as Bellamy stepped out, letting in the sound of beating rain, the ever-rich smell of damp earth, and the soft tinkling of the shoddy wind chimes. 

“I’ll build you a porch,” Bellamy decided in the doorway, calling it into the house with earnest determination. “Just as soon as I’m done with the pen and the room and the bed.”

Murphy grinned into the fire, shaking his head. “If we live that long,” he replied, and Bellamy’s resounding laugh faded away as the door closed behind him.

_Day 562_

It was raining again.

Murphy woke late, like he always did when the clouds smothered the sun. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and washed his face in the basin, dressed and ate the cold breakfast left on the table, and only then did he realize it was raining again.

Bellamy didn’t usually go fishing in the rain. Where was he?

Murphy bent to force his boots on without untying them and pulled on his coat, scowling as he thought about how Bellamy had the rain jacket and Murphy’s wool coat would be soaked and heavy by the time he made it down to the lake.

He opened the door, only it didn’t open at all.

Murphy tugged the iron handle again, and again, one long pull and then a couple of jerks to try and wrest it from its socket. He grabbed it with two hands and placed a boot against the doorframe and _yanked,_ feeling like the handle might come flying off, to no avail.

“Open, damn it,” he cursed, wrenching it again, twisting the handle ferociously and rapidly. _“Open!”_

Where was Bellamy? He crooked an elbow around the handle and pulled with all his weight, kneeling before the door and pressing his head to the wood. Open, he thought, feeling his breath coming faster with the effort. Open, open, open.

He backed away from the door with his demands gone unheard, massaging his stinging palm, chest coiling tight with panic. Where was he?

Murphy wedged between the table and chair to peer out of the window into the garden, but the plants were not moved to help him, stationary things that they were, and Bellamy wasn’t there. 

Maybe he was in the pen, Murphy thought, pushing past the curtain into the storage room where Bellamy’s bedroll was neatly folded up on one of the shelves. He pressed a hand to the back wall of the cabin and pushed his face close, calling out through the wood, “Bellamy?”

“Bellamy!”

_“Bellamy!”_

Silence answered, and Murphy backed into the middle of the cabin, looking around for any sign of him. There were no dirty dishes but Murphy’s, and his jacket and boots were gone, though he had left his records book on the bookshelf.

Breathing shallowly, Murphy took to the door again, yanking fruitlessly at the handle as the cabin shrunk in, in, in. _“Bellamy!”_ he screamed, though the plea came out weak and wet as his face crumpled against the wooden door, hands slipping from the handle. He turned and stumbled forward to look for something to get it open, but saw nothing he recognized at all.

The cabin, shrinking, twinkled with soft, honey light. There was soft carpet underfoot, and a silver pistol nestled in the tendrils of the rug. A lamp, and a suede cushion splattered with blood.

He tilted forward as the cabin spun and his sight blinked in and out, as his chest heaved and his face burned, and vaguely understood that he was on his knees.

A voice began to speak, loud in the empty room. _“_ ** _—tantrum— machine learning. Disasters and biological– happiness._** Hey— **_during simulations. I expected—_** Damn it. **_Not her fault. Emotion._** Come open— **_not an easy task. Keep—_ **Murphy? Murphy!”

“Let me out,” Murphy begged, lacing his fingers behind his neck and rocking forward on the floor as the ceiling seemed to cave in, coming down closer and closer to meet him. “Let me out!”

“Murphy, can you open the door?” someone asked, voice wavering and quiet behind some kind of thick film in Murphy’s brain. He shook his head in answer, breathing raggedly.

“Okay—“ the voice said, fighting the door that would never open. Murphy reached into the small space between his chest and his knees and grabbed at his heart, feeling his breath come and go so fast that he couldn’t catch any. “Damn it. Just— Get away from the window!“

Murphy crawled into the corner, and there was the crash and the tinkling of shattered glass, and a wet rock skidded across the floor. Murphy blinked hard as cold air blew in, pushing a few more tears down to his chin. 

He took in the bed with plaid blankets, the furnace, the clay plate on the table, the cabin’s door warped closed from the downpour, and Bellamy’s freckled hand stretching through the window.

Murphy clawed his way to the table and onto the chair, and hands reached over his hunched shoulders and grabbed the back of his coat, dragging him hard out of the house, so that his stomach and his thighs scraped along the windowsill, and then he was under the pounding rain.

Bellamy collected him against his chest and slumped to the ground with his back against the house, sitting amongst fat shards of broken glass and a put-off-looking fishing rod lying forgotten in the wet grass.

“Okay,” he soothed, as Murphy gripped his jacket with slick hands and curled close. He wrapped an arm around Murphy, rubbing grounding warmth into his shoulder. “Okay, okay.”

Murphy felt like a child in Bellamy’s arms; small, sick, and terrified, coming back to himself too slowly. He wasn’t in his right mind when he shoved his arm beneath the dark blue raincoat and pressed fingertip bruises between Bellamy’s ribs. Just wasn’t in his right mind, was all.

“Don’t leave,” Murphy insisted, voice broken, cracking as if over a million sticks and not quite loud enough over the rain beating on shingles. “Don’t—“  


“I’m here,” Bellamy murmured, rocking him by the shoulders, combing wet hair behind Murphy’s ear. “Right here.”

Giving another hiccuping gasp for breath, Murphy pulled his knees in and plastered his side along Bellamy’s chest. He made all sorts of squelching noises with his endless shifting, trying and failing to worm closer and be small enough to hold. “Don’t leave again.”

“Not gonna leave,” Bellamy promised, looking out over the drowning valley and wrapping both arms around Murphy, closing his eyes as rainwater dripped down from his brows. “Just went fishing.”

Murphy tried to pull himself together at that; to soothe his panic with sense. After breathing on the cusp of something steady for a few minutes, he tilted his head up to meet Bellamy’s worried eyes, deep with the color of earth, and felt another jagged bolt of terror at the thought of never seeing them again. 

“Hate fishing,” he sobbed.

Bellamy hugged him closer still.

_Day 578_

Something happened to Murphy, after that.

Bellamy had shaved down the swollen, waterlogged wood of the door so it swung open nice and smooth again, and kept it cracked open with a heavy rock for a doorstop whenever he was out. He’d covered the shattered window with an extra bit of tarp, and the smell of the pine pitch glue he’d used to hold it there was only putrid whenever one first stepped inside the house.

The wind blustered the square tarp, beating shapes into it from outside and whistling around the cabin as a great roll of thunder, too, rumbled over the valley. The fire in the furnace seemed to flicker with the gale, even if Murphy didn’t feel it at all under his mountain of blankets.

“I’m making you a bowl,” Bellamy announced, dipping the ladle into the savory if not a bit off-smelling stew he’d cooked as if he could not be stopped, though he paused and glanced sideways to gauge Murphy’s response.

Murphy avoided his eyes and turned over in the bed onto his stomach, closing his eyes. “Not hungry.”  


“Sure you are,” Bellamy said, and Murphy knew by the slopping noise he made that Bellamy had ladled out a bowl anyway. “Can’t go all day without eating.”

“You’re wasting the food,” Murphy grumbled, unmoving as Bellamy placed the bowls and mugs on the table, and pulled out both chairs.

“Not a waste,” said Bellamy gently, taking his seat in his creaking chair before the furnace, where he’d sit bright with his halo, perfect and brave and kind.

Murphy sunk underneath the blankets into stuffy darkness, thinking about how a better person would just get up and humor perfect, brave, kind Bellamy and stomach his fucking stew.

“Mmm,” Bellamy hummed, spoon clinking against the rim of the bowl, “Good,” like Murphy was two goddamn years old.

“Maybe if you feed it to me and sing a song,” Murphy muttered, voice muffled by the covers. Bellamy laughed brightly, making Murphy regret his joke and shrink in on himself. Bellamy would take any sign that his stupid little tricks were working and drive it until the wheels fell off.

“C’mere, then,” he beckoned, invoking strange mental pictures and sounding far too pleased. Murphy held very still, still as if he did not exist, until Bellamy began eating in silence again. 

He listened to the spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl, the hot shiver of the fire, the wind rattling the door and abusing the window sheet, and tried not to think of Bellamy sitting alone.

He lay there until his breathing had become even and slow enough to feign being either asleep or on the brink of death, either one a more acceptable reality than this, listening carefully for sounds of loneliness. Fruitlessly, as Bellamy finished his meal and unfolded himself from his chair to clean up, like a good person who didn’t mind things.

“I always liked storms,” mentioned Bellamy, as he collected the dishes and stoked the fire and quietly placed a bowl of lukewarm stew by the bed, and Murphy supposed he had hated himself for stupider reasons.

_Day 592_

It was just that there was no point if he was broken.

It was just that… if he was going to feel like this forever, like he was constantly falling apart and barely jamming his jagged edges back together long enough to stand, then there was no point.

He thought about killing himself. He wondered how long he could put it off before he couldn’t stand it anymore, before the possibility that Hell did exist scared him less than the thought of pretending to be alive any longer.

Murphy rolled a little wooden bear between his fingers, tracing the corners of roughly-hewn grain and looking into the jagged peaks of its benign, lopsided face. He’d carved it last winter, and had stowed it away in a crate of junk on the bottom of the bookshelf with its kin.

A few days ago, Murphy had woken to find a neat line of the little whittled animals sitting inconspicuously on the windowsill over his bed, another set on the thin ledge over the door like talismans, and the rest of them scattered about wherever they could be homed.

When Murphy had turned his head, he’d found the fox and the bear, side by side on the bedside table. 

White sun shimmered in through the windows, through which Murphy could see all the trembling skeleton trees of a late and dying fall, and casted the faintest shadow of the bear onto the wall beside him as he held it up to the light.

He liked the bear, and its winking little face.

The door creaked open suddenly, and who appeared in its frame but Bellamy, looking a bit dewey with the cold, his curls falling in whatever strange patterns they pleased, disturbed by the removal of his toboggan cap.

Bellamy closed the door and leaned against it, rubbing warmth into his hands with the wool hat between them, face twitching as he glanced from Murphy, to the furnace or the table or the window or the floor, and back to Murphy.

“What,” grumbled Murphy. Bellamy balled the cap in his hands and tucked it under his chin, looking uncharacteristically hesitant, if one was not so bold as to suggest he was being shy. “Spit it out,” he huffed.

Then, all in one breath, “There’s-a-deer-in-one-of-the-snare-traps-at-the-edge-of-the-woods-past-the-lake-and-I-can’t-drag-it-here-by-myself-so-I-need-your-help.”

Murphy turned over in bed onto his face. “Tie a rope to the other firewood pallet and put it on that.”

“It’s uphill, Murphy, it’ll just slide off, not to mention it’ll be just as heavy. Just come with me. It won’t even be an hour.”

Murphy ignored him, trying to pretend he had fallen asleep. It was quiet for a moment, and then a shock of cold air hit his bare legs and his arms where his shirt sleeves had ridden up. He gasped and rolled over, grabbing blindly and ferociously for the covers and only succeeding in slapping the back of his hand against Bellamy’s hip, who loomed over him with a bored expression.

“What the hell was that for?” Murphy cursed, leaning over to reach for the pile of blankets on the floor, but Bellamy smacked his hand away and grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him up onto his feet.

“I need help,” Bellamy said, sounding final. “One trip to the lake and back. That’s all I’m asking.”

Murphy stared at him, first with defiance, trying to yank his arm free, and then slumped as the cold circle of Bellamy’s big hand around his wrist proved unfaltering. “Bell,” he started, shaking his head.

But he didn’t have an excuse, and the height of Bellamy’s brow suggested he knew as much.

Murphy dressed slowly, feeling Bellamy’s eyes on him as the other man beat around the furnace and the table, noisily pretending to be doing something of grand importance if only so Murphy wouldn’t sneak back into bed the second he walked out the door.

When his boots and coat were on, he left the cabin without a word, letting the door rattle closed behind him.

A breeze tinkled playfully against the wind chimes, and Murphy closed his eyes, feeling the cold air prick at his skin, listening to the rustle of naked branches and the quiet clucks of the chickens. When he opened his eyes again, the valley had never looked quite so big, so endless.

A hand came to rest in the center of his back, and Murphy took a deep breath that could have sucked the whole world in.

“Ready to go?” Bellamy asked, voice rough and warm as always by Murphy’s ear. Murphy didn’t reply, still waiting for the world to turn gray again, so Bellamy simply threw an arm across Murphy’s shoulders and began walking, taking him along. Murphy crossed his arms and allowed it, tucking into Bellamy’s warm side.

Only until they could see the surface of the lake glimmering through the pines was he able to endure the closeness. Only until the beating of Murphy’s heart started to feel like too much, and he slipped away.

Bellamy glanced sideways at him, disappointed but not hurt, and tucked his empty hand into his pocket and hefted his shovel up over his shoulder instead of dragging it behind him, looking more now like he was off to gut an animal than strolling in the sunshine.

They didn’t speak, and Murphy tried to let the faint birdsong and the whisper of the wind overtake him like it used to, but was all too aware of how piercingly bright it all was, how the wind blew in unmannerly bursts rather than a steady breeze, how his legs felt weak and his head ached from hunger and light and sound. All too aware that even though he had everything he could want, he was still a miserable, worthless sack of crap, who ate through miracles like an endless black hole.

He’d never really thought maybe Bellamy would be right; that getting outside and working again would make him feel better. But was it supposed to make him feel worse?

Murphy felt like tying rocks to his waist and walking to the middle of the lake by the time they made their way into the thick of the trees, and it must have shown on his face.

“Look,” Bellamy said suddenly, voice tentative but serious. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m forcing you to do things.”

“In that case I guess I’ve severely misunderstood the meaning of being manhandled out of the house by a brute,” Murphy muttered, shuffling through the pine straw littering the forest floor.

Bellamy shook his head. “I really did just need help today. I’m sorry,” he said, and Murphy knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. “But you can’t lay in bed forever.”

“You think I want to?” snapped Murphy, already feeling heat behind his eyes at an argument they both knew was past due, an argument that had been practiced in silence a thousand times already.

“I don’t know, Murphy!” Bellamy exclaimed, throwing his hands up. “I don’t know what you want, or what you need! You don’t talk to me!”

“You don’t _listen!_ I’ve told you what I want!” Murphy yelled, stopping in his tracks and turning on Bellamy. “‘I want to stay in bed! I’m not hungry! I don’t want to work! Leave me alone!’ And what do you do?!” He waved his hands wildly at their feet sinking in pine straw and at the endless trees, emphasizing _outside!_

Bellamy glared at him, flushing dark in the face with anger. “So I’m just supposed to let you waste away and die, then!”

“It’s none of your goddamn business whether I waste away and die!” Murphy shouted, jabbing a bratty finger into his chest. Bellamy shoved him away, harsh and fast by the shoulder, sending Murphy off-kilter.

“It _is_ my goddamn business, because in case you hadn’t noticed, you asshole, I _care_ about you!”

Murphy’s narrowed eyes widened, and he stepped back as Bellamy tilted his twisted face up to the sky, his chest rising and falling hard. “You’re only here because there isn’t anywhere else to go. So don’t chalk it up to something it’s not. Don’t— don’t _lie.”_

Bellamy turned his head down again, laughing like someone who had found something particularly unfunny would laugh, and scrubbing harshly at his face. 

“You really are so fucking selfish, Murphy. I’ve been— I’ve been trying to take care of you this whole time! And you just—“ Bellamy laughed again, shaking his head as he turned to keep walking toward the snare. “You don’t get to decide how _I_ feel just because you hate yourself.”

“How _you_ feel?”Murphy spat, chasing after him. “Since when was this about _you?”_

Bellamy spun around at that, freezing Murphy in place with an expression contorted in fury. “Everything is _always_ about you!”

Murphy blinked as if slapped, watching Bellamy straighten up again, watching his face fall.

They stared at each other with heaving chests, dwarfed by the towering pines overlooking their tiny, pointless, human argument with great yawns and tittering green needles. An argument that felt, at the scale of two humans, like the end of everything that had been so impossibly good.

“I give up, Murphy,” said Bellamy. “You win.”

Strange, how Murphy didn’t feel like much of a winner.

Bellamy killed the poor buck in the trap as mercifully as one can kill anything, gutted it and buried the viscera while Murphy sat against a tree and pretended he was somewhere else, and they carried it to the cabin and hung it from a nearby tree in silence. Murphy returned to the cabin when they were finished, despite being the better skinner, shucking off his coat and his boots while Bellamy jerked on the hermit’s old rubber gloves and got to work on the carcass.

Murphy sat on the edge of the bed and reached out for the wooden bear on the little table, passing it between his palms as he listened through the cracked-open door to Bellamy dealing silently with all the gore on his lonesome.

And that, more than any thought that had made Murphy consider tying rocks to his waist and walking into the lake, struck him as a reason to start dealing with his broken pieces.

He couldn’t do much, but it probably wouldn’t kill him to do something.

So Murphy fed the chickens, and Murphy cleaned the dishes, and Murphy made dinner. Murphy had to steel himself to slip outside and gather a cleaned chunk of _something_ from the pile of meat cuts collecting underneath a folded tarp, but Bellamy only glanced at him and then turned back to methodically attacking what remained of the deer.

Murphy wouldn’t have blamed him, if he would rather have looked at a dangling mess of hacked meat and bone than Murphy’s face.

Bellamy had gone and buried the remains sometime near sundown, just as Murphy finished cooking the venison and carrots. He picked at the food but didn’t make himself a plate, and got into bed, feigning sleep again so Bellamy wouldn’t feel… pressured, or something, to accept what he was man enough to admit was a peace offering.

Bellamy trudged in eventually, with rings of blood around his elbows where the gloves had fallen short and a smear of it beneath his tired eyes, and kicked his boots off violently as Murphy peeked at him from under the blankets.

Then Bellamy ate quickly, in silence, being boring enough that Murphy soon closed his tiny window under the covers and actually minded his business, drifting in and out of consciousness. He was mostly somewhere between true sleep and just reliving their fight, again and again but always with something new and artistic thrown in, like Bellamy tackling him and gutting him like a deer.

Then Bellamy put his plate away and disappeared behind the curtain to change, to wash his face and brush his teeth using the fresh bucket of water Murphy had brought in for him. Eventually Bellamy collapsed on the rickety little bed he’d finally built, and Murphy pushed the covers down to his chest, finally able to breathe something other than his own hot air.

With his newfound freedom he stared at the block of blue moonlight stretching over the wood-paneled ceiling, and stewed in the understanding that he was not only a miserable, worthless sack of crap, but that venison and carrots wasn’t as good of an apology as he thought it would be, and that Bellamy had well and truly given up on him.

Murphy thought that was probably more than fair, and soon felt a hot tear slip from the corner of his eye and trickle down, tracing the shell of his ear. Then he was weeping in earnest, holding his breath to keep quiet, swaying so violently between thoughts of self-pity and self-hate that he couldn’t truly think at all; feeling more like a person-shaped tangle of misery than a human being.

He might as well have been, seeing as that was all he was good for.

Turning on his side so that he could comfortably muffle himself with his hand, pushing cruelly hard on his own mouth, Murphy caught sight of the fox and the bear. He clumsily took the bear in his hand and closed his eyes tight at the hurt that thrummed through him, though tears squeezed their heedless way out anyway.

Murphy had lost everything long ago, and had been playing the part of _having_ for years. The jailbird with the posse, the right hand man with the iron fist, the whip-tamed animal with good intentions, the villain with a hit-list, the pariah with a smile, the adventurer with faith, the good farmer with peace.

But at his core, Murphy had nothing, and no one, at all.

Suddenly breathless, he released his mouth from the punishing hold he had on it and wiped his tears with the heels of his palms, feeling his thoughts spiraling out of control all on their own.

Then a shadow came over him, and the bed creaked loudly as a warmth laid along his back and crowded him closer to the edge of the comically small bed.

“Can’t sleep,” Bellamy muttered like this was something they did, voice deep and tired, rumbling against Murphy.

Murphy didn’t answer, and Bellamy took to wrestling the covers out from under him so he could wriggle beneath them, increasing their shared warmth to the point of being uncomfortable.

He slept the opposite of Murphy, in green cotton pants that were a bit high-watered on him and without a shirt, and Murphy felt the nits of the worn fabric against his calves as Bellamy bent and slotted his legs between Murphy’s to fit in the bed without shoving Murphy over the side.

“This is not comfortable,” Murphy grumbled, and felt Bellamy’s sigh bloom against his back.

“Can’t sleep,” he said again, and Murphy rolled over onto his back to glare at him, but this only seemed to please the bed-stealing beast.

Bellamy’s gaze was soft in the low light of the moon, as he pushed himself up onto an elbow and peered down at Murphy, looking disappointed with the state of him. He reached up to wipe at the tears smeared across Murphy’s cheeks, shining faintly in the starlight. Unceremoniously, with all of his fingers that had so recently been dealing with a number of intestines, but tenderly nonetheless.

“No crying in baseball," Bellamy whispered, fond and searching Murphy’s eyes, before quirking his lips in a regretful smile at Murphy’s sniffling huff of indignation. “I wanted to say that I’m sorry, and that wasn’t how I meant for today to go. I didn’t mean what I said.”

“My fault,” Murphy answered, his voice thick and sticky in the aftermath of tears.

In another strange demonstration of affection that Bellamy seemed to think was standard or at least precedented, which it was not, he reached up to push his fingers through Murphy’s fringe. His hair had gotten long again and insisted on hanging over his forehead instead of parting down the middle, and Murphy was too sad to smile at the way Bellamy’s long curls nearly fell over his eyes too.

“I know you’re hurting,” Bellamy murmured. “You don’t need some asshole yelling at you.”

“You’re not an asshole,” admitted Murphy, to Bellamy’s obvious amusement. “You’re…” he paused, swallowing tightly and turning his head toward the table, but Bellamy reached out to place his fingers against Murphy’s jaw and turn his face back to him. Murphy met his eyes with a heart beating like a war drum. “You’re all I got, and a hell of a lot more than I deserve. You’ve had a shit go of it too, and you… You shouldn’t be stuck with someone who takes you for granted.”

“I’m not stuck,” Bellamy murmured, tracing Murphy’s chin with his thumb. “You’re good to me, Murphy, even if you can be a dick. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. You can argue with me all you want, you can do your worst, but that’s not gonna change. I bother you because I want to see you happy.”

Murphy stared, unbelieving that he could have this, any of this. Feeling like an open wound under Bellamy’s attention, raw and vulnerable and bleeding.

“I’d do anything for you,” Murphy confessed, feeling out of control, and then sucked in a breath that lifted Bellamy’s arm. Bellamy slid his hand down to splay it over Murphy’s racing heart, and dark eyes bored ceaselessly into his as Bellamy loomed over him, still and unwavering, sorting through Murphy’s pieces.

For a moment, Murphy thought he might say something truly terrible and cruel, like _“Then be happy.”_

But he didn’t. “Stay with me,” he decided, and Murphy silently agreed, meeting his eyes with weary determination, “and accept the fact that the only way you’re gonna shake me is if I die in some tragic and untimely accident, or you kill me, which we both know you aren’t particularly good at.”

“I _am_ sorry about that,” Murphy admitted with a grimace, sinking back into the pillow without realizing he’d been straining to get closer to Bellamy. The other man dropped from his elbows onto his back again, never taking his eyes from Murphy. “Last crazed attempt on your life. Cross my heart.”

“Forget it,” Bellamy said, flipping a dismissive hand up from his chest. “We’re even.”

They turned to each other in tandem, where Murphy found that their noses were quite close, and they smiled like it was the funniest thing in the world. Murphy had a nonsense thought, then, something along the lines of _only him._

“Goodnight, Fox,” Bellamy murmured, reaching a hand between them to run a finger across the curl of Murphy’s fist, clenched tight around the whittled bear. “I’m a cuddler,” he warned as he closed his eyes. “Wheeze if you need up.”

“G’night,” Murphy whispered, watching the freckles on Bellamy’s face to see if they danced with magic long after his breath had gone nice and even.

Bellamy was an early riser. When Murphy woke to a heavy arm across his stomach and a blossom of black curls under his chin, mid-afternoon sun was glaring in.

He closed his eyes again and wound the arm that Bellamy was crushing beneath his side around the sleeping man’s neck, knowing it would only go numb again under his big stupid head. 

He wasn’t sure he’d ever been _cuddled_ before, but, like most things with Bellamy, he imagined it involved a fair amount of self-sacrifice. And he couldn’t help but consider as he got settled again that, like most things with Bellamy, it always felt worth it.

Murphy couldn’t lay in bed forever, but one more day probably wouldn’t hurt anyone.

_Day 661_

“Enyo, fuck off,” said Murphy, shaking his leg as the hen pinched his calf through his pants with a sharp little beak. “Go eat.”

He’d filled their feeding dish with nuts and scrambled eggs, which he thought was a rather fanciful meal for a bunch of birds, and ducked into their coop while they were distracted to see if any of them had laid anything. Shortened winter days had proved to discourage the hens from laying almost every day as they had been, and Murphy couldn’t blame them.

Most days it seemed he’d hardly done anything at all before an orange afternoon had unraveled to black, inviting stars to glitter overhead and moonlight to trace the white clouds of Murphy’s breath on snowy evenings. By then he felt it natural to call it quits and turn in, to succumb to the warmth of the furnace and quiet conversation and his mountain of blankets, pleased and drowsy, these days, rather than hopeless.

There was one white egg nestled in a bit of disheveled bedding, and Murphy took it gently in cold hands, leaving Ares, Alala, Eris, and Athena, the normal ones, to their obsessive pecking. Enyo, though, chased after him to the gate of the pen, hopping up and down for attention.

“Needy,” Murphy murmured affectionately, squatting to scratch Enyo’s head through the wire. “Go eat.”

Enyo stared at him blankly as Murphy drew away, until Athena and Eris both set their eyes on a particularly large walnut and exploded into a whirlwind of flapping wings and greedy clucks, chasing one another about the pen for the nut. Enyo’s curiosity was sparked and she ran after them, joining in on the hunt, and Murphy was finally able to sneak away to the cabin free of a guilty conscious and visions of puppy-hen eyes.

Sometimes he wondered if Bellamy’s insistence on naming the flock after gods and goddesses of war was a self-fulfilling prophecy, or if they had already earned their names by eating their previous humans. Murphy wondered if they’d eat him too, should he die, or if his soul had maybe tainted his flesh. Was it strange, that he liked the idea of dying to feed something else?

A burst of warmth from the furnace hit Murphy as he stepped into the cabin and let the door rattle closed behind him, shivering the snowflakes off of his shoulders and out of his hair.  He rolled the egg onto the table, hung his jacket on the hook by the door and the toque too, and shucked off his boots, only to step in a puddle of something that squelched.

Murphy glanced down and frowned as he peeled his foot from the puddle, and when he at last ripped away from the sticky spill, he left it dotted with cotton nits. 

Bellamy was in charge of collecting the sap buckets from the outer woods and boiling their contents that day, and never failed to get some phase of it on everything but the roof.

“Ugh, Bellamy!” he shouted, hopping on one foot as he wrestled his dirtied sock off. “You spilled syrup at the door again! I’m not cleaning this shit up!”

“My bad,” Bellamy answered in a voice that was closer than Murphy expected, who paused and looked up in surprise, one foot still in hand as he wobbled on the other. Bellamy was standing in front of the storage room curtain and smiling, thought it was a bit strained, and hiding something behind his back. “I’ll clean it up.”

Murphy squinted, lowering his foot to a mercifully un-sticky floorboard. “Why is your face doing that?”

“Doing what?”  


“That,” Murphy accused, waving a hand in a circle around Bellamy’s face. “Is your stomach hurting again?” he asked, ambling over to sit on the bed and pulling a crate out between his legs. “I told you to throw out the rest of the cauliflower, I know I saw brown spots even if you didn’t.”

“Is my— what? No, I—“ 

Murphy huffed, digging through the clothes and shaking his head. “Why would I ever want a dog, when I have you to to keep food away from and to leave me mystery puddles to step in.”

“Murphy,” Bellamy tried to interject.

“Not everything has to have flies swarming around it for it to go bad, you know. And you can’t just sniff things and expect to—“  


“Murphy!” 

“What?!”  


Murphy snapped his head up, brows furrowed, though the scrunch of his face softened at the sight of Bellamy’s exasperated, sideways smile. He was handing something to Murphy, a thick, green book with a picture of a cake on its cover. There were old, yellowed notes sticking out from between the pages.

“What’s this?” Murphy asked, taking the book and resting it on his knees, flipping through the pages to watch the words do a dizzying dance across their pages.

“I went to the village today, while I was getting the sap,” Bellamy explained, stuffing his hands in his pockets. Bellamy looked a bit maroon as Murphy glanced up at him, confused. “It’s a cookbook. I thought you might like it.”

Murphy looked down again, tracing the sun-paled cover with a calloused finger. “You got this for me?”

Bellamy shifted, reaching up to scratch at the freckles on his arm. “Obviously I’d help you cook,” he said quietly, sounding unsure of himself as Murphy placed the book on the bed and bent over to dig around in his clothes crate again.

“It’s okay if you don’t want it.”

Murphy ignored him, and pulled what he was looking for out of the crate.

“Here,” he said, and held it out to Bellamy, who took it carefully in his hands, like it might break.

Thought it would certainly not break; a dark blue scarf made of thick wool that Murphy had found a week ago and stashed, unsure of whether Bellamy would appreciate it, unsure of whether it was strange to give someone a gift for such a simple and unpractical reason.

“I think you look nice in blue,” he explained, and Bellamy unraveled the scarf and let it drape over his hands, staring at it like it was a contraption he didn’t understand.

“You think I look… nice?”

“In blue,” Murphy persisted, and Bellamy had taken on the likeness of a dark rose again. 

Murphy looked down to stare at the cookbook as if it were saying something very important, flipping through pages he could not read and wondering again, wondering endlessly, why Bellamy’s face was making that face.

“How about now?” he asked, voice low like stones rolling underwater. Murphy steeled himself, and looked up to find Bellamy wrapped up to his chin in blue wool and smiling like something was funny.

His hair had gotten so long, curling delicately over his brows, and his skin was smooth from the cold and rosy from the attention. His halo flickered in the firelight. He looked so good in blue.

“Very nice,” he complimented, willing himself to sound normal.

“Thanks, Murphy.” Bellamy licked his lips as if nervous, and then held his arms out in invitation.

And no matter how many tremors it sent through him, Murphy couldn’t very well deny him that, could he?

He stepped into Bellamy’s embrace with all the courage he could muster, and, as was the way of things with Bellamy, felt the trembling walls of himself tumble.

“I like the book,” he whispered against his shoulder, wondering when Bellamy would let go. “Not a fan of reading, though.”

“Lucky for us I’ve been told I have an amazing reading voice,” Bellamy answered, pulling back to show Murphy a grin. _“Beef bourguignon,”_ he demonstrated, voice low and thick, and his pronunciation so wildly wrong that Murphy had to throw his head back and laugh.

Bellamy just kept smiling and curled his fingers against Murphy’s spine, and when he came down from the laughter Murphy felt dizzy. 

No one had ever just let it go, acted like it was no problem at all, acted like there was nothing sad about Murphy not making it past the sixth grade, nothing sad about someone looking at a page and seeing all the words as if underwater.

And most of all, no one had ever held him quite like this.

Only him, Murphy thought.

“I like the scarf,” Bellamy mumbled beside his ear, and then, quieter, “But I think I liked getting a compliment from _you_ of all people more.”

Murphy swallowed, surer than anything he’d ever been sure of that Bellamy must have been able to feel his heart speeding like a racehorse and intended to kill him. 

“Of course you would, you egomaniac,” he croaked, and Bellamy definitely wanted to kill him, hated him and wanted him to die a slow, painful death, because he pulled back and used that curious smile on Murphy, closer than it had ever been.

“Are you making up for thinking I look nice by being mean to me?”

“Always am,” Murphy replied without thinking, and then felt a bit like his head might explode as Bellamy’s smile widened to his ears, treasure-struck.

“Murphy,” he said, “There’s one more thing I’ve been wanting.”

His gaze flicked down to Murphy’s lips, like they had so often since that evening in autumn when they had woken up tangled together just so. His eyes gleamed the way they used to before a good fight or after a half-baked plan gone right, the way they did when Bellamy’s blood was on fire.

Murphy, feeling his heart pound and his breath come faster, wondered how truly insane he must have looked himself.

“A matching hat?” he asked weakly, leaning heavily against Bellamy’s arms around him as that blazing gaze seemed to come closer and closer, as Bellamy’s hand smoothed up over his spine to hold him carefully by the neck.

“No, Murphy,” he rasped, brushing the tip of his nose down the long line of Murphy’s, until his breath ghosted over his lips, and _was this really happening?_ “Not a matching hat.” 

“Good,” Murphy agreed, nodding closer so that his lips brushed the corner of Bellamy’s mouth, and then pulling away again just to keep his own head above water because there was _no way this was happening_. “I don’t know how to crochet.”

Bellamy sighed, still smiling, and stopped carefully chasing Murphy’s mouth to meet his eyes with a raised brow. His stare was glowing with firelight, sparking with anticipation for something that Murphy had to accept was _happening_. 

“Shut up, Murphy,” he said, in a way so different from all the times before, and swept in to capture his mouth.

It was chaste and slow, as Murphy reeled over the feeling of faintly winter-chapped lips softening under his own, the whisper of stubble scraping his chin, the sweet, woodsy smell of him, like so much maple.

He was _kissing_ Bellamy Blake.

Now, Murphy had imagined this, of course. It was usually harder, angrier, with someone pinned against a wall somewhere and Bellamy only doing it because he hated Murphy and wanted to make him miserable.

This was something else.

This was soft, as Bellamy took only enough breaths to stay alive and returned again to shift warm lips across Murphy’s, little drags of the tongue and big palms smoothing up Murphy's sides, over his back, along his jaw, like he had to touch him everywhere.

This was kinder, as Bellamy leaned away only to search Murphy’s eyes for something and come back again, kissing him with a smile even though Murphy couldn’t return it for the life of him, dazed and confused and barely holding himself up.

This was standing in the middle of their _home_ , by a warm fire and with snow tinkling against the last window to their names and the wooden floor sticky with syrup, and Murphy only had one sock on.

This was the strangest thing that had ever happened to anyone in the world.

Murphy pulled back to collect himself and gasp for another breath, searching Bellamy’s dark eyes like there was still any mystery to be solved. _Since when?_ he thought, feeling suddenly giddy. _Did he think of Murphy often? Did he want to kiss him all the time?_

Bellamy looked surprised as Murphy’s lips finally stretched into a disbelieving smile, and laughed, unprepared, as Murphy swept in for a hard kiss that sent them both stumbling into the table.

“I wish you had told me how much you liked scarves a long time ago,” he mumbled against Bellamy’s mouth, feeling like he might have floated up and tumbled off into space if he hadn’t grabbed the ends of that stupid scarf to pull Bellamy closer.

Bellamy, who smiled so wide that it should have been impossible to kiss him if Murphy weren’t so stubborn, and replied to Murphy’s lips, “I wish you had told me how much you liked blue.”

_Day 1,987_

Five years.

The ship should have come down months ago. Bellamy and Murphy couldn’t unearth the buried bunker alone, and everyone inside had probably already begun to starve, if they weren’t all dead already.

Dry summer grass folded quietly under Murphy’s boots as he hiked up the slope behind the house and came upon Bellamy on the tallest part of the curve, just outside of the trees feeding up the mountain.

Bellamy always sat on the top of the hill when he was thinking of his sister, his friends; like he could get closer to space and nearer the wastelands where they were buried all at once. He was still close to the cabin, to Murphy, who wondered if he felt like he was being pulled in three different directions. Murphy, who wondered which he would choose, if given the choice.

Bellamy looked even more glum than usual, and was quiet as he rested his chin on his knees and stared up at the blue sky, fiddling with the strap on that pair of old ski goggles.

“Three rabbits, today,” Murphy mentioned as he sat down beside him and waited for a rocket to blast through the clouds. The world remained as silent and empty as always.

“Mm,” replied Bellamy.

Murphy picked at a thread on his sleeve. “I have a feeling it’ll rain tomorrow. Maybe it’ll cool down a bit.”

“Mhm,” Bellamy answered.

Sitting back on his elbows and weaving his fingers through the grass, Murphy tilted his head back to look at the trees towering behind them and the dark soil beneath for beechnuts. When he tipped his head forward again, there was a butterfly perched on the toe of his boot, leisurely spreading its cobalt wings and bringing them together again.

“Hey,” Murphy laughed, reaching out to touch Bellamy. “Look.”

But Bellamy was already looking, dark eyes filling fast with tears.

_“Bell,”_ whispered Murphy, shaking the butterfly off and scooting closer to bring a tightly-coiled Bellamy into the circle of his arms. “S’alright.”

He dropped his head to his knees and hid his face, and his shoulders shook as he tried to cry quietly, like there was anyone to disturb. 

“They’re not coming back, are they?” he asked, sounding so much younger than Murphy had ever heard him.

Murphy lowered his head to Bellamy’s, pressing his lips to the back of Bellamy’s neck and then resting his chin there, and he watched dust crawl along what he could see of the wasteland from this height.

He didn’t answer. There was nothing Murphy could have said that would placate Bellamy, who knew well that Murphy didn’t care whether anyone else in the world but them lived or died.

“She liked butterflies,” Bellamy explained, voice broken, and wiped his face with the back of his hand before hiding it away again.

Murphy smoothed a calloused hand over the curve of Bellamy’s back, holding him until he could catch his breath. “Butterflies are nice,” he said, pointless, useless, avoidant, and shut his eyes as Bellamy turned his head just a little bit further away.

But there was nothing Murphy could have said.

_Day 2,193_

“Splash me again. I will _end_ you.”

Bellamy smiled, blindingly so. “Oh, yeah, tough guy?”

“Get,” Murphy grunted, wading with great difficulty into the lake as Bellamy beat waves of water at him, “over here,” he ground out, squinting against the assault, “and let me cut your hair.”

Bellamy’s lips twitched as Murphy slipped over the mossy pebbles and stretched out his knife-wielding arm to keep from stabbing himself in the eye. “Look at this,” he reprimanded, scowling and waving the knife around as Bellamy snickered. “You’re putting me in danger.”

“Fine,” Bellamy conceded, sighing, but still looking far too pleased as Murphy shook the water from his hair. “Make me beautiful.”  


Murphy closed in on him, and his heart stuttered like it always did around Bellamy, even now, as the man reached up to gingerly peel dark strands of wet hair from Murphy’s cheeks.

“You sure?” Murphy asked, a little breathless as he slung an arm around Bellamy’s neck, bringing them chest to chest, “It might take me ages to fix such a hideous monster.”

Bellamy grinned and leaned forward to catch Murphy’s mouth in a kiss, dragging his teeth carefully over the swell of Murphy’s lip. Murphy’s toes curled under the water as he hung pliant and useless off of Bellamy, always doing whatever he could not to faint like a Victorian maiden when Bellamy decided to act like this.

“Good thing we’ve got all the time in the world,” he said as they parted, breathily and with a sideways tilt to his mouth like it was funny.

Murphy— with a blush from ear to ear because he never quite got used to this, the way every kiss with Bellamy felt like the very first one— collected himself quickly, shaking his head and patting Bellamy’s stupid, gorgeous chest.

“I will not be distracted by your wiles,” he declared, twirling his knife in hand as Bellamy raised a brow, obviously thinking otherwise. “Turn around.”

Relenting, Bellamy finally allowed Murphy to start trimming away at the ends of his hair, which had already gotten too long again. Bellamy seemed to want to let it grow out until he looked like a biblical disciple, so Murphy was forced to be the reasonable one. Even if Bellamy had looked cute in a ponytail. They were _not_ going to be ponytail farmers.

“Murphy,” Bellamy said suddenly, muscles tensing as Murphy trapped a few clippings of hair on Bellamy’s back under his wet finger and flicked them off in the water.

“Nope,” answered Murphy, shaking his head and smoothing out another section of hair between his fingers, “No going back now, I’m already a third of the way done.”

“No,” said Bellamy, slowly reaching back to push Murphy away, but missing by a mile and swatting at empty air. “No, Murphy, look,” he insisted, staring up at the cloudy sky.

Murphy obliged, and felt his heart plummet at the sight of a charcoal dot, falling slow against a curtain of fog.

They stared wordlessly at the dot, watching it grow until it caught flame, lighting up in a brilliant starburst of orange.

“It’s entering the atmosphere,” Bellamy said, needlessly, eyes wide and shining with awe. “It’s a ship. It’s— it could be _them.”_

Murphy blinked as the flames peeled away and left what must have been a hulking metal space station hurtling towards the earth, nothing like the little white pod Bellamy had described.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, that’s not them. That’s a different ship.”

“It could be,” Bellamy said, breathless, and then tore out of the water like it’d been electrified.

Murphy stumbled after him, heart pounding fiercely as Bellamy gathered his clothes and his boots and began speeding toward the hill. “Bellamy, wait!”  


“I have to see, Murphy!” he shouted, tripping and catching himself on his hand, leaving a boot behind that Murphy gathered for him as he tried to catch up.

They raced each other toward the cabin and Bellamy made it there first, and the door slammed loudly against the bookshelf as he barreled inside, grabbing the backpack that he hadn’t unpacked in six years. Murphy stood stricken in the doorway, watching him fight his way into clothes that clung to his wet skin.

Then, with wild eyes, Bellamy made to shove past Murphy, muscling him out of the doorway and only coming back to himself as he registered the hurt on Murphy’s face.

He reached out and took Murphy by the shoulders, a blazing urgency in his stare. “Come with me.”

Murphy shook his head and hugged the boot to his chest. “Don’t go.”

“I have to see,” he said again, and hooked his fingers around the rim of the boot to take it away. “I’ll come back.”  


“No, you won’t,” Murphy realized with a sinking horror, eyes darting between Bellamy’s. He wouldn’t, not if it was really them, who he’d been waiting for all this time.

“I will,” Bellamy promised, _lied,_ leaning in to kiss Murphy goodbye like everything was okay, like Murphy was stupid.

Murphy took a step back before Bellamy could touch him. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t come back.”

With his jaw tightened and eyes flashing with hurt, Bellamy put the boot on and turned to the east, and Murphy watched him go until he could no longer tell that the left half of his hair was shorter than the rest.

He’d known it couldn’t last, and he’d known it would hurt like nothing had ever hurt before when it was over.

Murphy fell to his knees.

He’d known all this time, and it didn’t really make much of a difference, in the end.

_Day 2,194_

He kept busy.

There was so much to do now, on his own.

Foraging trips, tending the garden, feeding the chickens, emptying the traps, house repairs, skinning, cooking, drying, and not fucking fishing.

Murphy kept busy, and didn’t think of Bellamy once. He was fine before, he’d be fine again.

That night he sat on the cooking stool and stirred circles in a thick stew, shivering as the wind blew the steam away from a crack in the door, where Murphy wouldn’t take the stone from between it and the frame. 

He rolled the wooden bear in his free hand, and thought of how he might save the leftover stew. He’d made enough for two, again.

_Day 2,197_

After Murphy finished raking out the chicken coop and filling the food and water dishes, he released Ares and the hens from their respective pens, planning to govern with that iron fist of his should the rooster get disrespectful, or to intervene if any of them made a break for it off of the yellow hill.

He crossed his legs as he sat on his stool and leaned heavily against the house, working away at carving the soft curves and twiggy legs of a hen into a chunk of wood.

Murphy flicked a few curly shavings from his shorts, carefully eyeing Alala, who kept plopping down to pant in the hot sun, but refused to seek intermittent shade under the portico with the others.

“Must have seen a bug,” he guessed aloud, as Enyo pulled at his boot’s untied strings. She glanced up momentarily, cocking her head at his voice, and then returned to coaxing the stubborn worms out of their holes.

Murphy lowered his carving and watched her waste her own time, feeling an awful lot like he could understand being a chicken trying forever to unlace a shoe.

He wondered how long one could do it, waste their time, before they accepted that there was no point, and no winning.

He thought of lying in the sun, arguing on the dock, slow dinners spent talking by the fire, laughing under the stars, strolling in autumn woods, rainy mornings in bed, splashing in the lake, and kissing someone drunk.

He thought of Bellamy. 

He thought of when wasting time hadn’t felt like a waste at all.

_Day 2,201_

“Come on,” he groaned, wiping his hand around in dust and empty space. Murphy’s calves strained as he stood on his toes and wobbled into the shelves, rattling the other crates and containers and tools. 

He needed more firewood, which meant he needed the axe, which he kept on the top shelf closest to the curtain, which meant he needed to be just an inch taller to grab it from where Bellamy had last pushed it to the wall.

He closed his eyes as he stretched himself into a long line, and felt the wooden handle under his fingers just before he flexed them and nudged it farther away.

“Damn it,” he cursed, beating his palm against the frame of the shelves and slumping back onto his heels, and his legs pressed against the rickety bed again.

The bed whose room was never finished because Bellamy and Murphy were good builders, but not that good. The bed which was too big for the storage room, and made it so that Murphy could not bring the cooking stool in to stand on. The bed whose owner had always gotten anything they needed off of the top shelf.

Murphy looked down at it, reaching out slowly to slide the navy cloth of an old blanket between his fingers. The fabric was patchy and moth-eaten, and it was unraveling at the ends. He twirled a blue string around his knuckle, and it fell in a loose curl as he let it go.

He stepped on his own heels to push off his boots, tested the strength of the creaking frame with a socked foot, and carefully climbed onto the bed, steadying himself with a hand on the storage shelves. He tilted forward and found the axe easily, and took the opportunity to push the other tools forward on their shelf so they’d be easier to reach.

Stepping down from the bed, Murphy sat at the end of it and pulled his boots on again, and smoothed the covers down when he stood.

He could get rid of the bed, destroy it or use the frame for something else, like a low table or a bench for the portico. He could get rid of it, and have room to stand on the cooking stool to reach the top shelf.

He picked a few nits from the blanket, and snapped a few of the strings away, and shook the flat pillow into an even shape. After standing back and finding it satisfactory, Murphy took up his axe and made to the door, letting it fall shut on the stopping-stone.

The walk to the edge of the woods was often short, but he took the long way, weaving down to where the spiles waited for winter amongst old, massive maples.

Standing before the tree they had decided was the largest and oldest of them all, Murphy stared.

In the thick bark was a jagged, white scar.

_“What should I write?”_

_Murphy brought the axe down and snapped another limb away from the felled tree, and raised it up again, glancing over at Bellamy. He was stood before the big maple in the center of a ring of younger trees, now a half-moon of stumps._

_They always got their firewood here in the winter, had been for three years. The furnace had to burn day and night to fend off the cold, and Murphy liked the sweet smell of the maple when it burned._

_Bellamy switched his pocketknife in and out again, looking thoughtfully at the big tree trunk. Murphy rolled his eyes and brought the axe down again with a_ ‘crack.’ 

_“You do remember that the last to clear their side of the tree has to split all the logs.”_

_“That’s a bit wordy,” Bellamy replied, and then shot a smile over his shoulder as Murphy snorted and banished another branch with his heel. “I’m coming, promise. I just want to…”_

_He looked back at the tree as if hypnotized, and Murphy leaned on his axe to watch autumn leaves creak off from the maple and float down around him, red and orange and yellow like sparks from a firestorm._

_“Why don’t you write ‘Bellamy is a lazy oaf and makes poor Murphy do all of the work always,’” he suggested, and grinned as the corners of Bellamy’s lips quirked up again, ever-so-slightly. Murphy wanted to kiss him all the time._

_“Brevity really is the soul of wit, Murphy,” he replied, approaching the tree at last as Murphy shook his head, and resumed hacking away the wiry branches on the fallen tree._

_He returned some time later to his handsaw, and blew a dark curl from his eye to gaze at Murphy, looking pleased with himself despite having done nothing at all._

_“You’re splitting the logs,” Murphy said, tearing away his last branch._

_Bellamy shrugged. “Then I guess you can take a break when we get home.”_

_With a pause from massaging his aching arm, Murphy glanced up, brows knitted in suspicion. “I guess so,” he agreed, knowing he’d end up helping Bellamy anyway, because there wasn’t much to do without him._

_Bellamy just smiled, and Murphy suspected he knew as much._

Murphy stared at the old maple, in whose thick bark was a jagged, white scar which read, 

_Mhbruy lvocs Beh,_

and if Murphy looked long and hard the way he had never tried to before, it read,

_Murphy loves Bell._

_ Day 2,206 _

A rumbling awoke Murphy, deep and loud in the silent valley. He startled off of the side of the bed and his shoulder thumped hard against the floor, and Murphy clawed his way out of the blankets tangled around his legs, searching for a weapon.

He grabbed the fishing rod leaning by the door in a panic, and was trying to decide between appraising the threat from the window or finding the axe when the grumbling ceased. There were a few loud slams, and then something, several somethings, moving quietly over the grass.

“Quaint,” said a voice, floating in through the cracked doorway.

Murphy moved to the window and gripped the sill, peeking out to see none but the whole peanut gallery filtering out of a rover.

They looked older, and they looked… happier than Murphy remembered.

Monty and Jasper were squatting against the chicken pens, and Jasper laughed and tugged his hand away as Eris pecked at his fingers through the wire. Clarke walked with her arms crossed around the perimeter of the cabin, appraising the architecture, and Murphy sank lower behind the window to hide from her. His pulse rocketed at the sight of Raven, who seemed to be making her way, slowly, to the well behind the house. Her gait was still uneven, but seemed stronger and surer.

Then his sights fell on Octavia, who reached into Ares’ pen and lifted its latch, releasing him into the hens’ space. Murphy clenched his jaw. Ares needed to be supervised, and they had no idea what to look for, and who were they to show up here, to start touching all of his things like they had a right to them?

Wishing suddenly that he had a rifle to chase them off with, Murphy jerked on the pair of shorts he’d left on the floor and stormed to the door, heart thumping hard in his chest.

They’d probably never been turned away in their lives. He’d show them. He’d show them what it was like to not be wanted, to be sent away, told to never come back—

He slammed into a wall of muscle as he flung the door open, and his stormy expression fell as he looked up, up, up into a pair of brown eyes, rough and old and beloved, and so antique to Murphy.

“I would have sent a postcard,” said Bellamy, “But—"

Murphy swallowed. "No stamps?"

"No stamps," Bellamy agreed.

And for all his fear and fury, Murphy flung himself forward, wrapping the man at his door in an embrace desperate enough to crush bone.

“I hate you,” Murphy whispered, breath hot against Bellamy’s collarbone, and curled his fingers in Bellamy’s shirt. “I hate you.”  


“I came back,” answered Bellamy, releasing his grip on Murphy’s shoulder to slide a hand up his neck and to the base of his skull. It recalled grabbing the scruff of a puppy, and Murphy resented that almost as much as he hated the way that he was no match for it at all. “You knew I would come back.”

Murphy tried to shake his head, but Bellamy held his grip and his stare as he pulled them apart like _Murphy_ had done something wrong.

“This house is my home as much as it is yours,” he said, “and you’re my home as much as this house is. You knew I’d always come back.”

Murphy felt the tear slip from his eye before he’d felt it gathering, and Bellamy pulled him close again, tucking Murphy’s face into his shoulder. “You and that fucking fishing rod,” he sighed, grinning into Murphy’s hair as a wet laugh burst from him. 

Murphy let the rod fall to the ground, and with his hands free he took Bellamy by the wrists and pulled him into a slow, still kiss, feeling every bit like being frozen in time.

Up until someone wolf-whistled, and Murphy was sorely reminded of the cartoon cast of unpleasant memories milling around as if invited.

Bellamy glanced over his shoulder and then turned an apologetic grimace on Murphy. “Just let me show them around,” he said, “They won’t say anything to you.”

“Why do I doubt that?" Murphy sighed as he watched Octavia tap her foot and glare at him from where she waited by the rover.

“You’re amazing,” Bellamy whispered quickly, planting a kiss on his cheek before whirling around to usher Clarke and Raven inside, who ‘ooh’ed and ‘aw’ed at all of Bellamy and Murphy’s things like they were in a museum.

Murphy didn’t even have time to think about whether or not he had cleaned up last night’s dishes before Octavia was on him like a shark on blood, pulling him to the rover by his shirt collar.

He tried to feign boredom, taking in her dark outfit of so many black robes and metal buckles, and the blood-red makeup that made her look fierce and fiery.

“He says you’ve changed,” she said, releasing him when he jerked himself away from her.

Murphy’s mouth tilted into a derisive smile despite himself. “It’s the haircut, isn’t it?”

“If you hurt him again—” she started, leveling him with a doomsday glare that had no effect on Murphy, before she melted back against the rover, shaking her head. “I don’t know what I expected to find when I got out of that bunker, but my brother dating _you_ was not on the list.”

Murphy wasn’t sure _what_ they were, but ‘dating' didn’t seem like the right word for it at all.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he said, showing his palms in pretend apology, but Octavia had a tilt to her mouth like she didn’t quite agree.

“No,” she said, “I think— I think he’s happy.”

Murphy followed her tired gaze to where Bellamy was waving his hands over the front of the cabin to Clarke and Raven’s interest, clearly demonstrating where his mystical porch was going to go.

A fond smile danced its way onto Murphy’s face, and when he turned around again, he was in good company, Octavia’s expression having softened considerably. 

“I don’t know you, Murphy,” she said, “but I trust my brother, and he loves you.” She uncrossed her arms then, and sighed. “Just don’t make me kill you, okay?”

“I'll try my level best,” he said sweetly, and Octavia scowled again, clambering back inside the rover.

Murphy took the moment of freedom to catch his breath, and to sneak into the chickens’ pen while Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee were distracted by fighting over the well handle. 

He hurriedly rescued Athena from Ares’ bullying and herded the rooster back into his own pen, and then lowered himself to the turned-over crate nestled in the dirt to watch Bellamy gesture at things inside the house, explaining the intricacies of _pots_ and _pans_ to Raven, while Clarke inspected all of Murphy’s carvings along the windowsill, and smiled shyly out at him after sensing his gaze.

He looked away, grimacing at the sight of his bare feet collecting dark dirt. If the circus hadn’t woken him and barged in at the asscrack of afternoon he would have had time to put his boots on.

He supposed he’d sit here and wait until they left, and then he’d pretend this was all just a bad dream, one where everything felt so very real. Even, if not especially, the pecking of Enyo’s beak at a button on Murphy’s shorts’ pocket.

Murphy reached down to scratch at her neck and huffed as the other hens peeped at and crowded him for attention too, Alala going so far as to hop into his lap and close her eyes. He petted her anyway, smoothing down the small, slick feathers of her back.

“It’s a good look on you, Murphy,” said a voice, and Murphy opened his eyes to a darker sky and a wood post against his head, and a small crowd by the pen’s fence. He lifted his head up and blinked, and Raven didn’t smile, but she didn’t look angry, either. “Didn’t peg you for a farmer.”

The hens had all fallen asleep, either on his knees, his lap, or his dirty feet, and Murphy imagined he must have been a strange sight to see.

“Neither did I,” he admitted, hoping honesty would go far with Raven for reasons he couldn’t figure. She nodded, and made her way back to the rover.

Jasper looked uneasy and reached up to tug at those goofy goggles of his, which hung at last around the proper neck again, as Monty did the talking. “We’ve got a couple hundred people to move into this valley," he said matter-of-factly. "Bellamy says everything east of the lake is yours, so we won’t encroach, but we’d like to come up and visit, sometimes. Jasper likes the chickens.”

“Whatever Bellamy wants,” Murphy answered, which didn’t seem to satisfy Monty, but he and Jasper, after one last wave at Enyo, piled into the rover too.

At last, Clarke approached, and Murphy’s heart sped up as she stepped inside the pen and came close, kneeling at his side and running a pale hand over Athena’s feathers. “I’d like to get to know the real you,” she said quietly, expression revealing nothing in the dark evening.

“Careful, Princess,” he ground out, willing his voice not to shake as he searched her eyes. “The others might think you’re trying to make friends with the lunatic.”

She smiled, far from perturbed. “I don’t think you’re a lunatic. I think you might just be the chicken man on the hill with a house full of wooden figurines.”

Despite everything, Murphy laughed, loud and unfettered.

Clarke looked immensely pleased, and held out a hand for the shaking. Murphy took it, breathing easier as she stood and gave their arms a jerk.

“And don’t worry,” she said, stepping out of the pen and shutting it behind her. “I’ll make Jasper wait a few weeks before he comes up to bother you two.”

Murphy nodded gratefully, an unbidden smile quirking on his lips, and found himself watching the silhouette of the rover rumble down through the valley until it passed into the pines and disappeared.

At the door, Bellamy was leaning against one of the posts holding up the portico, grinning peacefully as Murphy approached.

“Amazing,” he repeated, and yanked Murphy toward him by the front of his shirt, pressing a wondering kiss to his lips. “Amazing.”

“Didn’t do anything,” Murphy mumbled, letting himself be kissed again and again.

“You have no idea,” insisted Bellamy, raising his hand to drag his thumb across Murphy’s cheekbone, to curl his fingers behind Murphy’s ear. “I thought you’d be furious that I brought them here.”

Murphy sighed, closing his eyes. He’d been stupid and cruel, like he always was. “They’re your friends. Your _sister_. I shouldn’t have—“

“Stop it,” Bellamy interrupted, catching Murphy’s flittering gaze. “Everything’s perfect now.”

Murphy stared helplessly, heart stuttering in his chest. Bellamy’s family was home, his friends were home, hundreds of other people to choose from were home, and he still wanted to stay here, in the house on the yellow hill with Murphy.

“Everything?” he asked, hoping to sound teasing before he sounded insecure, because he was oh so tired of sounding insecure.

“Everything but those feet,” Bellamy answered, pulling a sopping rag out from the bucket of water at his feet and gesturing at Murphy to sit down. “As if I’m gonna let you inside like that, mudcake.” Murphy rolled his eyes but obediently sat, and Bellamy fell beside him, quiet as Murphy washed himself up to the knees.

He watched glinting stars break free from the dark film of evening from under the portico, and listened to Bellamy weaving his fingers through the grass. He was murmuring about building his damn porch again, always wanting to fix something, change something, make things better.

“Would you ever want us to move down there?” Murphy asked suddenly, before he’d realized he was going to ask. “To their village?”

He gazed thoughtfully at Murphy as if he were some big, ancient maple, in need of the right words. 

“I kind of like being alone,” Bellamy answered at last, leaning his head against Murphy’s arm as he watched the moon.

Murphy looked up at it, great and gleaming like all those years ago on the ocean, leading him to the lighthouse where his life would end and begin again. He reached up to card his fingers through Bellamy's lopsided curls, feeling like it was plenty fair to call this solitude.

“Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> you lived! you read the whole stupid thing!
> 
> im going to miss working on this one i really am.
> 
> please leave a kudos if you read and a comment if you liked (or hated... i guess...) it's always nice to see some Fucking Numbers and Words
> 
> (p.s. fellow writers, if i may call myself one: like all my fics, this was kind of a style experiment to see if i had the patience to write something detailed and what i consider slow-moving, because i've noticed some of my fics move a bit fast, and to lend more focus to character development. i hope i hit some kind of happy medium here, since i've always struggled with pacing. not sure why i'm telling you my life story here, i guess to invite any thoughts or comments on my writing style which i always really appreciate)
> 
> all of my love to my friends who hyped me up to write something different and dear to me <3 
> 
> come see me @slugcities on twitter
> 
> UPDATE: [BEAUTIFUL ART](https://twitter.com/oogaboogu/status/1255940222740725763?s=20) BY [OOGABOOGU](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oogaboogu)


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